Bird on a Wire
by Lanie Kay-Aleese
Summary: The youkai are nearly extinct, but dangers still pulse deep beneath the cement covering the Kanto plain. In a city where the winds blow too strong for birds to cling to telephone wires, what happens to those who find fate too much for their souls to bear?
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note

This story is based off of my experiences living in a Japanese community in the outskirts of Tokyo for the past 4 years. While much of what I've seen and what I've lived has been positive, there is certainly a dark side of life here - just as I believe is hinted at existing in the feudal era in _Inuyasha_. I hope you have enjoyed this exploration of the theme, and a rather under-noticed and under-appreciated pairing. It has truly set my writing skills to the task. Thanks to Vivian, my betafish and friend as always.

Full Summary (&disclaimer)

The feudal era may have passed on, and the youkai have been all but fully extinguished, but dangers still pulse deep beneath the cement covering the Kanto plain. In a city where the winds blow too strong for birds to cling onto telephone wires, what happens to old souls who find that fate is too much for their hearts to bear? Not A/U, Sess/Rin. Dark themes. Violence (some sexual), underage romantic relationship, implied character death. Not for young readers. _You've been warned_.

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**Bird on a wire**

_._

_one__  
><em>

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_**May 29, 2004**  
>Sesshoumaru<em>

There had been no air conditioning on the train. The JR corporation had apparently deemed it premature to turn the fans back on, even with the recent heat wave that had blanketed the city. _Cutthroat measures_, Sesshoumaru had thought with grudging respect, and let his aura flare as tightly around him as he could without allowing it to visibly manifest. This action was usually enough to fill humans with unfamiliar dread, to repel them, to make them cower in fear - but inside the train car, it did nothing. There wasn't even room to place a foot fully on the floor, much less to bend backward. There were simply too many people. The air inside the train was thick with the human's breaths, tempered with rotting pieces of food behind teeth that hadn't been washed away, stale alcohol and dried sweat on the jackets of suits, and the complicated and wearying fumes of the machine. His arms were fixed to his sides as unbalanced men bumped against him, rubbing arms as the train rattled along noisily on the track.

Sesshoumaru had stood still. Calm, even, on the surface.

Even as his senses, stretched to their limit, failed him, and he began to hallucinate.

_She's here, _they told him. _She's here. She's here._

.

His business partner was waiting for him on the platform, his polished Italian leather shoes toeing the yellow line that demarcated the queue for Car #6. He looked the better part of a clever, fifty-year old businessman, standing head and shoulders above the other passengers in his crisply tailored suit, with shiny glass lenses over his eyes and unusually well-coiffed and thick black hair.

Appearances, though, were deceiving.

The platform was crowded before the doors had opened, and then the passengers spilled out like juice from a cut tomato, running in all directions and filling up all the gaps between tightly standing lines of customers in transit. Sesshoumaru exited the car and approached him with a measured gait and affected coolness. Already the air from within the train was mixing with that of the inner city, only slightly less stale and metal-tinted.

"Kodagawa," he said.

"Sesshoumaru," returned the man, approaching. Had he been human, he would have been too far away for his voice to reach his partner. But then, he was not human, and the voice did reach. "Did you have a nice ride? I did; I always do. The train is one of my favorite human inventions. Perhaps you managed to find a seat?"

"No."

The man waved it off. "It was a good exercise, though, you must admit. After all, wasn't that your first time to ride a train since before the war? Reminds you a bit of the good old days, doesn't it?"

"In the good old days," said Sesshoumaru stiffly, "humans were at least cultured enough to remove their shoes when they entered the car."

"There are things to be said for the new ways, too."

Sesshoumaru began to walk toward the exit. His business partner waddled after him, voice edging on chiding.

"Come, now. I can tell from your silence that you must disagree, and I won't have it! Even _you_ must be impressed by the most recent technological advances, the stunning displays of power that overcome even our own innate-"

"In the _better _days," Sesshoumaru interrupted, his voice low, "humans were content to ride on horses."

"And let me assume that in the best of days, humans bowed to youkai and were ruled over with an iron fist?"

Sesshoumaru looked at him in the way that one might look at a colony of ants before stepping on its queen.

"That," he said, voice cool, "has not changed. It is just more subtly done."

Sesshoumaru observed the station as they walked out from the escalator to the heart of the station. He collected himself in the only way he knew how, grasping onto a sense of _place _that grounded him in the rushing fog of time. Little stalls of _bento_ lunches sat beside bagel shops that sat beside convenient stores, miniaturized but filled with harsh, luminescent white-yellow light. And in spite of this the station felt like it were less a building than some perverted form of nature; the mouth of a gigantic cave with far too flat a floor. Sesshoumaru could hear a single bird swooping above his head, searching for a place to land among rafters, trapped inside the station as if within a massive cage. It was determined to remain in the sky and yet it seemed did not have a place in it any longer. Thinking of it in this way, the thought filled him with annoyance. At this rate, who knew if there would even be birds at all in another century?

A girl bumped into him quite suddenly, shoving his briefcase against his leg, and without apology tottered off in her oversize heels. He flicked his chin at her in annoyance.

"I have to say," interrupted his business partner. "You _do_ seem more hostile than usual today, letting out the fangs and all."

Sesshoumaru's annoyance doubled. He lowered his voice as if to make it seem as though it had halved.

"_Inugami_ have sharper senses than other, lesser demons, and this… place…. pains my senses."

"That O.L. who bumped into you smelled just fine to me; she had a lovely floral perfume… Or perhaps it was not your sense of smell but your sense of touch that was ignited? Don't tell me that dogs sense pain more sharply than other youkai!" exclaimed Kodagawa, evidently not overlooking the slight to his own supernatural prowess. He continued, "If a puny human bumping into you could cause _this _much discomfort, I don't know how you got through those feudal wars. Surely it's not something else bothering you?"

A brief glimpse of the girl on the train roared to the front of his mind, but it was blurry, vague, almost unformed_. A hallucination. _He forcibly suppressed the troubling image and lied smoothly.

"My father's retainer got into a traffic accident after lunch today. I've been on the edge of lateness for the entire day as a result."

The other youkai chuckled. "Jaken's still around, then? If I know him, it was less of an accident than an act of revenge. To a biker, perhaps? He would find their hectic driving threatening…"

They passed through the gates, allowing their phones to glance off of screens as they walked. "Let us cease this chatter and conduct our business," Sesshoumaru suggested, his tone deceptively mild as he slipped his phone back into his pocket.

It had been over fifty years since he and the man had interacted, much less in a business context. The lesser youkai obviously did not seem to know the difference between the expression of barely concealed loathing that was on Sesshoumaru's face and the one that Sesshoumaru gifted on all of his other business partners and rivals alike.

"Yes, business," agreed Kodagawa. He had a brashness to him that was unsuited for a youkai of rank. He chatted exuberantly about profit margins and completely lost himself in carrying zeros and ones as Kodagawa's driver met them for the short journey to their restaurant. Even once they had concluded their meal, he did not realize that his cell phone had been completely silent for two hours, nor did he realize that he had been slowly growing drunk and saying preposterous things without receiving any censure.

But then, he was a fool.

.

"Well done, well done, honorable Sesshoumaru-sama," wailed Jaken from the driver's seat of the short limo. Even disguised as a human, he was as Sesshoumaru had implied: still short enough to require a booster seat (and a bit of straining of the neck) in order to see through the windshield. "Everything went as you planned! The office of Kodagawa Corporation was raided forty minutes ago. Our insider has indicated that charges of tax fraud will be levied by the end of the business week."

Sesshoumaru acknowledged this with silence as they left behind the restaurant in the rear view and moved swiftly on to the highway, on the way to the second meeting of the evening.

He carefully poured crystallized water from a chilled decanter, and his invisible claws made a comforting, ringing noise as they touched the cut-crystal glass. _Power_, the musical note seemed to tell him_._ That it had come form his pure strength against a delicate symbol of prestige and success only deepened his pleasure in the beauty. This was one of his favorite thoughts, though there had been a time when it had nearly been usurped by another…

_No more of these thoughts tonight._

"What is next on the itinerary?" he asked drolly.

"Ahhh, yes, my lord. This lowly Jaken will deliver you to the Park Hyatt Hotel in just under five minutes." They rolled to a stop at a traffic light with manufactured-perfect control. The engine hummed beneath the hood. Sesshoumaru could hear every single click of the gears, the whirs of fans, the snaps of electricity as they passed through circuits. _Power, _he thought again, focusing himself as Jaken spoke. "Both Satou-san of Marubeni and Botashi-san of Daimatsu are awaiting the very good news of your meeting with Kodagawa-san. It would be my greatest pleasure to alert the concierge on your behalf to open your table at The Lotus Room."

"Then you may take care of it."

Jaken's eyes watered in delight.

Sesshoumaru flicked his gaze out the window. From the corner of his eye, Sesshoumaru could see the morning edition of the _Nikkei _sitting on the pavement. It was lying at an odd angle, but he quickly skimmed the headlines and images. Of course his eyes landed on the date, which he had already known, but felt led to check all the same.

He took a long sip of water from his chilled glass, and placed it back into the velvet-lined drink holder just before the car began to move again.

He could see a train in the distance, crossing over a bridge with too many lights and signs clamoring for attention. The smog poured out around it in a swirling gray haze, each molecule drenching the air with its pungent, cloying scent. The sensory noise of it momentarily sickened him as he recalled the stale air of the rail car, and closed his eyes.

_She _appeared.

The hallucination refused to stay down in his mind, and Sesshoumaru would not lie to himself and allow himself a further loss of control. He accepted, though with difficulty, that something had plugged up his senses, and made them lie to him in the three minutes he had been forced to endure the trip in the train. He had sensed her, right down to the delicate touch of her fingers, soft as feathers as they brushed his back when she turned around to exit the train.

But of course she hadn't been there; she couldn't have been. She'd been dead for over four hundred years.

He would think nothing more of it. He had to ensure Kodagawa's downfall, after all - and it would be done tonight.

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_**February 4, 2006**  
>Rika<em>

Rika was fourteen years old, and her mother was dead.

No one had told her that death would be like this - _unconquerable_, she'd known that, and _final, _certainly, but never _unsurprising_. In a way, it felt as if her mother had always been lying face down on the tatami mat in a pool of blood, like she was simply rejoining a destiny that had been hers long before Rika had even been born.

This did not make it hurt any less.

When Rika had come back from a quick run to the store for milk, she'd found the door to their one-room apartment unlocked and ajar. She had only to look inside before she saw her mother's body flat across the ground, and the blood pooling around her like the center of the Japanese flag. Rika had immediately collapsed on the ground, her knees slamming against the door frame hard enough to cause bruises. But she was already lost in a fit of pain.

The blur of hurt swept over her like a pitiless wind, stripping her of thought, of knowing even where she was. Of what anything mattered. She managed to crawl across the room to her mother's side, and took the limp hand in her own, crying out her mother's name. She knew it would do nothing, but it didn't matter.

It was some time before she could look at the body.

There was no hope for a hospital, a second chance at life: Her mother was not going to be getting up. Not ever again. The corpse's eyes were open, fixed in a stare at the opposite wall. The skin of her cheeks had cooled down, even though the rouge that she'd rubbed onto her cheekbones that morning hadn't had time to fade. The muscles on her face were slack, expressionless and Rika could only hope this meant that she hadn't endured any pain. It looked as if she'd just come back inside, having forgotten something on her way out when she'd been struck down by surprise. She was still in her thick, faux-fur-hooded overcoat with a black-lace mini-dress on underneath. Her tall black heels were still on her feet. The nails were painted red - a red that matched the stain that was now on Rika's hands, the edges of her white blouse, and her knees.

Seeing the blood on herself brought her back. The raw hurt was now overcome by an even stronger emotion. _Fear._

The men who had attacked her mother were coming for her, too. She knew it. And for a fleeting moment she could imagine herself being ripped apart by them like dogs, her throat torn out and her body left by the root of a tree, to bake in the sun until her soul was evaporated into the sky like water.

.

The knock came on the door while Rika was getting ready for school, adjusting the fabric beneath her sailor's collar, making sure that it laid flat and clean against her breasts. Her mother's smell was sharp and pungent in the air, coppery and putrid even underneath the blanket she had been covered with so lovingly.

Rika was determined to be brave.

But she was not.

She crossed the room and unlatched the window that led to the balcony and pushed it aside with trembling hands. She stared out at her clothes, still hung on dozens of pins, swirling on the plastic hanger. Beyond the balcony, just an arm reach away, was another apartment. Not an inch of sky hung in-between the balcony and the opposite building. There was not even enough space for a bird to break free.

She wished she could try.

The knocking came again; this time, it was accompanied by a voice.

"Rika-chan. Rika-chan, are you in there? Is everything okay?"

It was her landlord.

She cracked open the door. "Oya-san*," she said, forcing her voice out from her throat. It was hoarse from a night of crying, and cracked like the places where the walls met in her apartment. "Now is not a good time."

"Let me in, Rika-chan," said the woman. "I know what happened. You have nothing to hide."

Her words had been the only part of her that were polite in their stilted language. Startled, Rika stepped backward and let the door open. Her landlord moved into the room, and for the first time she did something very strange: she did not apologize for entering the space. Nor did she care for the dead, Rika realized, as the woman neatly stepped around the body and sat down beside the piled bedding against the wall. She brushed a fold off of her skirt with a dainty motion. A small piece of horror fell into place.

Rika had been expecting the men to come for her. But she should have known that they dealt at a much closer range.

"May I have some tea, Rika?" she asked.

"My mother-"

"You're a good girl, aren't you?" asked the woman, sharply. Rika nodded, but the dread was only amplified inside her chest. She turned toward the counter and plugged in the electric kettle with trembling, awkward hands.

"Are you with them?" she found herself asking. "Or…"

"This whole _neighborhood _is 'with' them, Rika. What do you think it means to live in a Buraku*? We all look after each other here."

It took everything in her not to scream; to take out all her rage in tightly clenched fists. "How? How is this?"

"You are very young, so I will try to make this simple. In the western world, there is a saying, you know. 'A deal is a deal'," said the landlord into the thickly silent room. "Your mother had a contract, which she broke. Although it is perhaps regrettable, what happened to your mother this morning-"

"It was _murder_!"

"Was it?" interrupted the landlord. "Is it possible to murder a person with no registered birth certificate… with no evidence that they were meant to exist? Someone who has always lived off of others' kindness? Is it truly their right to say where their soul belongs; in their present body or in their future reincarnation's, when in this body, they are only a burden?"

Rika turned around, unable to bear it any longer. "But how does that it make it _your _right? I can't believe my, my mother would have agreed that you could kill her if she didn't… do whatever she needed to do. Why couldn't you just have let her find some other way to fulfill her debt? Surely there was something, _anything-_"

"Do you think she died out of anything but her own spite?" bit back the landlord, raising her voice, and her body, to her feet. "She would not have died had she not protested so violently. This is the consequence of fighting, Rika. Now what about you? Are you going to give me my tea or do you also not do as you are told?"

Rika was gripped with panic so strong that she felt her lungs giving in. "It's here! It's here," she said. Her voice was shrill. But she had somehow forced her body to stop shaking. She placed the teabag into the hot water and walked across the room to the landlord, careful to step over her mother's body, careful to keep her face composed as the rank smell entered her nose. Careful not to spill the tea. Careful not to touch the hands of her landlord as she passed it over.

The task was done. It was almost as if she had been passing over her life. She sat down across from the landlord, if only because her legs could no longer bear to hold her up.

"You may not be of age to work yet, but your mother's contract still stands, Rika. You understand that you'll have to take care of it now, and be a responsible daughter, don't you?"

Everything outside the apartment was still, and motionless, right up to the wall. And it was always still. The light hung heavily, thickly in the air. Rika wished there was someone, somewhere she could go to, someone who would care for her, but her mother was gone. And there had never been anyone else.

It was as if the wind was moving her body, pushing her forward. She could only hope to hold to her ground. And she _would._ She felt herself nodding.

"Good girl," said the landlord, and sipped the tea.

.

*Oya(-san) - respectful manner of addressing a landlord

*-san suffix is used to be polite, similar meaning to 'mr.' or 'ms.'

*-chan suffix is generally used for children or girls, sounds cute and affectionate

*Buraku - a neighborhood in which Burakumin, an impoverished 'hidden' underclass of Japanese people, have traditionally been forced to live. See wikipedia for more.

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_tbc_


	2. Chapter 2

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**Bird on a wire**

_._

_two_

_._

_**February 4, 2006**  
>Jaken<em>

The client leaned forward and laughed right next to Jaken's ears, and he could only partly restrain his shudder as the sound banged around inside his head.

He had never managed to build a resistance to alcohol like his lord and master, and after the first two rounds, the drink was already breaking down all of his other supposedly elite and powerful senses. He couldn't see the ceiling anymore, though that could have been the fault of the steadily building smoke. Cigarettes were lit all around him, reminding him briefly of summer nights filled with lightning bugs. The more he drank, the less he could remember quite where he was supposed to be, whether in the moment or in the memories that were folded so far back in his mind that he could barely reach them- too many years of living had a tendency to do that to a mind - and Jaken could barely see the dancing girls on the stage. Of course, he hadn't been watching them closely anyway.

The humans he had brought to entertain, however, were more aptly riveted to the pole dancers than ever, now that Jaken had abandoned pretense at conversation. He could sense that the time had come to draw the night to a close, as far as his involvement went in it. Jaken let out a disgruntled sigh and got up from his seat, muttering an excuse about a restroom break. He hardly had to go several feet before the floor manager made eye contact with him. Jaken did not have to make any subtle gestures, or sly maneuvers. The man came over to him, weaving through the long tables and booths of customers.

When he spoke, his voice ran over Jaken's skin, smooth like oil. "How many do you need?" he drawled, and Jaken felt only the briefest twinge of disgust. His eyes moved to the stage only a moment before he returned his gaze to the manager, burying his discomfort quickly and masking it with the reminder of his great privilege - to serve Sesshoumaru-sama with all the love-struck fealty that his being could contain. But no pleasure, after nights like these, was left untainted.

"One apiece, for the night." Then he pointed and carefully rose his whisper. "The _kachou* _is in the corner. He must have the best one you have. What was the name of that AV star… Suzuki…?"

The manager waved his hand. "_Suzume_, and she has already been... taken off premises for the evening. But I have one you may find even better, a young virgin-"

Jaken cut in. "That won't be necessary. You know that all I care about is someone who can be guaranteed to do the job, I don't need any of the under-the-counter stuff."

"Trust me, this one _will _do the job." The manager leaned in briefly, like a snake flicking his tongue out briefly to feel the air. "You asked for the best, and she'd beat out any of the girls on stage tonight. She's almost too good to be… She has legs up to _here_._"_

The toad youkai sighed wearily and wiped at his forehead. "How much do you want for her?"

"Just thirty-five _man._"*

Jaken spluttered.

"Impossible. With a price like that, she could never fit in my boss's parameters! You're wasting my time."

"As far as parameters go, she's young, _native_, and _bijin*. _No problems there, Jaken-san."

"I don't believe it."

"I know it's cheap, but she's a rush deal. Take a look at her picture," the manager said, repeating, "It's a rush deal. Thirty-five _man._"

Jaken took the phone, flinching as the manager's fingers brushed against his. For a second he felt contaminated, but then the touch withdrew and he was left holding the machine aloft in his own sweaty palms. The shiny metal glinted, and he could see the flash of lights from the stage, the swirling movement of women's hips. "I don't see anything."

"The monitor is on the other side."

Jaken turned the phone around in his hands. But his eyes had only just could barely focus on the picture, and the photo of a frightened girl. His head was swimming now.

He was swimming through a river; no, he was being overtaken by the current after plummeting through the air. It was too strong for him to reach the sky. He was drowning, drowning alive. He was dying. Everything was growing dark, and there was no hope - _And then my master came. He pulled me out. He pulled both of us out._

Something was shaking in his hand. It felt like a little hand in his, and not like a phone. It was wet and cold.

_"'If anything happens to Rin,'" _he remembered thinking, "_Sesshoumaru-sama will kill me!'"_

"I'm sorry?" said the manager, breaking his gaze from a quick sweep of the floor and its clientele. "I didn't quite catch that."

"I… I didn't say anything." Jaken closed the phone hesitantly, and gave it back. "But I must see that girl. Right away."

The manager appeared concerned. "What of your clients?"

"One apiece," he heard himself saying, but even his voice was being carried away now by the river in his head.

He did not care.

Everything around him was rippling like water.

.

_**February 5, 2006**  
>Past Midnight<em>

_Rika_

When she was twelve years old, Rika had heard a little girl singing a song on a crowded train.

She had never heard the song again, even though she'd hoped to find its source. After several hours of scouring the internet for a copy of the lyrics, she'd reluctantly given up her search. Each bar of music, however, was deeply ingrained in her head and had been from the very moment she'd first heard them, filling her with a sense of childish longing. Of comfort. And the lines that she could remember held her captive now as she slipped her shirt off of her shoulders for the last time as a child.

"Inside the wave," she found herself singing, her soprano fragile. Her heart fluttered against her wrist as the shirt hem grazed over her collarbone. "Inside the wind…"

She unhooked the clasp of her skirt, and let it fall to her ankles, a darker puddle over her blouse.

"Inside the forest, inside the dream…"

She got onto the futon and waited as she'd been told.

There was no way to tell how much time passed inside the windowless room. It wasn't cold, but sometimes she felt goosebumps beginning to stretch across her skin, but before the panic could rise she had to remind herself, _I choose this. I choose this. _And then she cleared her mind of any thought at all.

By the time the voices came, she almost believed that she was in control.

But they grew louder, and everything fell apart. The last lines of song came out as a whisper.

_"Where are you?"_

The locks on the door rattled, and one after another, the gears clicked back and released. Rika let out her breath in a shallow rasp. She forgot to take a new one in as the door was pushed open, as if by the hand of fate.

Reflexively, she raised her arms to cover herself as the the man from earlier in the afternoon appeared in the door frame. He didn't seem to care about her state of dress, or even her, for that matter; his focused was on someone standing in the hallway to his left.

"Here she is," he said. "Take a look for yourself."

He stepped aside, and the shadow changed over, exposing a man in a deep gray suit who seemed to be about 70 years old. The man wore round silver glasses on top of a nose that overwhelmed his face. He was balding, short, with sickly yellow skin covered in age spots and moles.

He stood ramrod straight, and Rika cringed as his watery eyes snagged hers. _I must hold my ground_, she thought, concentrating on keeping her gaze steady as the man's expression contorted into one of comical shock. She swallowed defiantly, though whether she was rebelling against him or herself, she had no idea, but all she could do now was let the reality of her situation sink in. This was the man who - the man who was buying her. She had known he would be ugly, and that she would not be someone she could become attracted to, but she could not keep herself from feeling angry anyway. She hated the way he looked at her, so dumbfounded, and she wondered if he would make that same face while he was on top of her and she didn't want that at _all_, she-

"How much is she?" croaked the amphibious man in a wet voice.

"Forty_ man_, including the extra five _man _for the preview," the manager drawled. He moved to close the door.

"No!" The salary man's* hand was out in a flash, catching the barrier before it closed him out from her sight. Rika's heart thudded violently in her chest, and she realized that she, too, had reached out just a bit - afraid, in spite of her terrifying future, to be shut out from the world again.

"Have you changed your mind?" The manager asked. "Surely you don't need to see any more-"

"Yes! I've changed my mind!" His eyes were bulging in his skull as he looked past the door to see her. She curled up into herself a little more. "I'll take her," croaked the man, "But I don't want her for the night. I want… I want to make a _purchase_."

.

_Sesshoumaru_

Jaken never messaged Sesshoumaru on the nights he spent out in the backstreets of Kabukicho and Asakusa, entertaining clients after their dinners. Sesshoumaru had established certain rules for these evenings in the years after he'd formed his post-war empire. Connections had been forged with certain establishments; the risks were all but eliminated, leaving only room for profit. Jaken had known for centuries what Sesshoumaru wanted him to do when circumstances changed or patterns deviated from the ones that had been set, and it could be surmised in a simple phrase: _take care of it yourself_. In all that time there had never been conflicts requiring Sesshoumaru's attention in the after-dinner affairs. There was no yardstick, therefore, for him to use in measuring the meaning of Jaken's words in the sudden email sent to his phone twelve minutes past midnight one Tuesday morning:

_Great, honored Sesshoumaru-sama, this lowly Jaken condescends to request your presence at the apartment as soon as possible. And to disregard the three-hundred man charge on his platinum credit card, my lord. There is an issue which regretfully can only be discussed in person._

He closed down his computer and left the office without another word.

When the elevator door slid open and he stepped into the penthouse lobby, he found the double doors to his apartment not only firmly shut, but double locked - once with a bolt-key, and once with sacred charms that had been stolen from a shrine long ago. There was the faintest residual smell of fear, and it seemed to be human. Annoyed, but more intrigued than before, Sesshoumaru moved forward and broke the locks off with a tug of his arm. The charms, of course, let him pass inside.

"Jaken," he called out as he walked through the forced-open doors.

But he only went as far into his_ genkan _as a single step. His foot hung still in the air, mere inches from the floor as his senses went wild. _She's here, _they told him, urgent and clear. _She's here, she's here._

For the first time in years, Sesshoumaru just wanted to run.

He wanted to run to the room where he could smell _her _and he wanted to run the opposite way, back into the elevator shaft, back to his office where he could pretend nothing had ever happened.

But strength was in the ability to overcome fear, not in cowardice. He would rather be a fool than a coward. And he would not gain anything by running, so instead, he acted with deliberate calm. He carefully put down his foot and let it touch the ritually clean patch of floor at the front of his house. He slipped off his brown leather shoes and then, as Jaken had not arrived to perform the task for him, he took out a pair of slippers from the cupboard.

"Jaken!" he called again as he closed the folding doors to the cupboard. When the toad youkai failed to reply for a second time, Sesshoumaru felt the briefest shadow of concern. He let the house slippers dangle from where they rested in the curl of his fingers as he began to search with his senses. Reaching out, he passed over the fragrances of food inside the kitchen, the mildew just starting to collect outside the pipes in the walls. Another room past, and there it was - Jaken's youki emanated from the second bedroom, the same bedroom where _her _scent was concentrated along with other disturbing ones like dried blood. Before he could investigate, however, he felt his awareness tugged into the next room, drawn as ever by the energy of the swords born of his ancient family line. Tokijin was, as always, subdued from the long stretch of time in which it had not come into contact with flesh and bone. But Tenseiga was pulsating on the wall like the beat of a heart.

It had been so long since he had felt either of his swords speak to him, that he nearly lost himself in the connection between his father and himself. But then Jaken's voice rang in through the walls.

"Calm down, calm down!" his retainer was pleading. "I'm just trying to-"

"Let me out!" cried a voice. In an instant, all of Sesshoumaru's senses attuned to the person who held that anguished voice, and every sound that mattered in the world. He heard the sound of fingernails crushing down against the fabric of sheets on a bed. He heard the way her hair fell across a pillow strand by strand. He heard her rapid breathing, the rise and fall of her frail and human chest. Her heart was beating in tune with Tensaiga's, thrumming fast like the heart of a bird on a wire on a windy winter day. It was the pulse of a panicked creature resigned to suffering. And yet of one whom was strong enough to endure it.

.

_Rika_

The man entered the room so abruptly, so silently that Rika would have missed it if she'd only been dependent on her hearing and her vision. But there was another sense that made her aware; it prickled the skin on the back of her neck like she were caught in deja vu. But she had never felt such a strong sense of a person's presence before, and the immediacy of it silenced the shout she'd built up inside of her throat. _Who is this man_? she wondered. _Can this person really be the bug-eyed man's master? The man who I was purchased for?_

Rika tried to wrap her head around the idea, but her mind resisted. He did not look like the pedophile, the deviant, the horrible person that she had been expecting. Instead, he looked pristine. Somehow perfect, which was strange. He was about the age her mother had been. He had steely black eyes behind loose, peppered silver and black hair that reached his shoulders at their tips. The highlights in his hair looked like they were strands of moonbeams. His features were distantly attractive, too; masculine yet delicate, like a middle aged actor's or maybe an ex-idol. And there was something about his body, about the way he wore his suit that made it look like a piece of clothing she had never seen before. His shoulders were wide, and his pants were perfectly pressed. It all effected the appearance of unsettling height and power that pressed her back against the back of the bed as he crossed the room without a word, and approached her with dark eyes fastened on her own. They were assessing her as well, she realized.

"Lord Sesshoumaru!" cried her purchaser, scrunching up the yukata in his hand as he bowed his head sharply. The action was summarily ignored by the man now bending to her side with singular purpose - the man called Sesshoumaru, her mind supplied. She stared up at him, still searching for words when he picked up her chin and cradled her jaw in his large hand. His palm, she thought self-consciously, felt warm and terribly taut, the strength latent like a storm fighting to be let out from where they were held back by mountains. It would take so little effort for him to contract his muscles, just a little, and snap her neck. She could _feel _that. But he seemed, instead, content to stare at her, trapping her with palpable force. He did not blink. It felt as if he were afraid she would disappear were he to look away.

And yet he had still not said a word. Rin became so unsettled by his stare that when she spoke, it felt as if the bravery came from within some hidden well that she had never before encountered or known.

"I want you to let go of me."

The man's lips twitched down for a moment. But he continued to observe her, his eyes now moving to other parts of her body, his expression placid.

"Did you hear me?" she raised her voice slightly. "I said-"

"Quiet, you insolent girl!" peeped the small man from the corner.

This provoked Sesshoumaru to speak. "Out, Jaken," he said, in a low, deep voice. A _masculine_ voice, her mind supplied unhelpfully. _Dangerous_, too, it continued, as the little man - Jaken - left the room in a pique of subservience. The door closed behind him, drawing to a quiet close on the plush gray carpet.

Sesshoumaru finally slipped his hands from her face. Something clenched inside of her stomach.

"Who are you?" he asked her.

"My name is Nakamura Rika," she answered, and drawing her eyebrows together, returned, "Who are _you_?"

The man, strangely, took some time to consider the question before replying.

"I am known as Inutaisho Sesshoumaru."

"Your name is 'the mean and murderous dog lord?'"

"Yes," he said in a tone that broke no argument, and gave her a quick once-over. "Where did you come from?"

Rika hesitated before answering, thinking of the man who had brought her in. It was strange. _This_ man almost seemed as if he had not expected to find her in the room. But, Rika considered, he had come and touched her as softly as a caress as soon as she had arrived. He had done it nonchalantly, as if it were his right. So he had obviously known that she had been brought to him, for him. The only way she could understand the line of his questioning were if it was some sort of a test.

"Your servant brought me here," she said, choosing her words carefully. "He purchased me."

"Then you are a slave."

Rika gasped. "What?"

She had never even let the thought cross her mind since her landlord led her from her apartment, even as she thought inevitably of prisons and contracts and the impossibility of the word _free. _The word _slave _was too big, too awful. It meant that she did not belong to herself; that she was nothing more than a piece of furniture, a thing_, _incapable of choice. And that could not be if she could not keep her body for herself, she was determined to be the master of everything contained within it. To be free inside her cage.

"You belong to me now," the man clarified.

"Fine. Yes," Rika submitted. "But not by my choice. Your servant purchased me from a place where I was forced to… to sell my body. But not my life."

The expressionless mask of the man cracked. He looked murderous, unsympathetic. Even inhuman behind his glasses, and Rika felt she would soon break from the fear, that it would leave her sobbing on the bed. She should not have tested him, making the comment that she was not his slave by choice. Surely that was what had angered him? Surely he could not be sympathetic to her plight; not when she had been purchased for his pleasure.

"There… That's your answer," she said, her voice wavering. "Have I satisfied your curiosity, or can we… can we get it over with? If you're going to..."

"Stop crying," said the man tersely. "This Sesshoumaru is not pleased."

Rika had not realized she was crying. Humiliated, she attempted to hold back her tears with a great intake of breath. The man in front of her, this man who called himself _Sesshoumaru_, got to his feet. He towered over her bed, a pillar of a man. His hand reached toward his trousers - and she held herself still as she anticipated him unbuttoning his fly and pulling himself out before her, but instead, he reached into his pocket and brought out a crisply folded linen handkerchief. He did not hand it to her, but dropped it onto her stomach.

She could only stare at it.

"Well?" he asked after she did not move for several seconds. "Will you not take it?"

"I can't," she answered, her voice choked. "My hands are tied behind my back."

The man reached behind her and deftly cut the twine rope around her wrists with, it seemed, his fingers. Mystified, Rika took her wrists in her hands and rubbed them for just a moment before remembering the handkerchief on her chest. After better adjusting her seated position, and the hem of her uniform skirt, she reached out and accepted the handkerchief gratefully. She dabbed it at her eyes, even wiped at her nose (improper as it was). When she looked up again, feeling that the wave of emotion had largely passed, she found him staring at her intently.

"You do not have living family," he stated.

Rika shook her head. He looked as if he were about to reach out and touch her face again, but she snapped up her chin to meet him in the eye.

His gesture fell short of its intended target, but his eyes revealed nothing. Instead, he drew himself up and looked down at her, and stated in the most formal and ancient words she had ever heard, "From this day forth, you will not be my slave, but my ward. Consider this day the day of your adoption into the family _Inutaisho_."

_Adopted? Ward? Surely not…_

"What did you say?" she asked, head reeling.

He repeated himself, his tone flat. "You will be my ward," he stated firmly.

"Can you do that?" she asked, head reeling.

"This Sesshoumaru does whatever he wishes."

"And what about my wishes? Did you consider whether I want you to be my guardian or not? I don't even know you- You don't even know _me_-"

"Do not test my patience," said the man, but Rika could only continue to insist, helpless to the flow of words spilling from her mouth, "But this doesn't make sense! You must want something from me!"

"I only want you to be safe," he said with some difficulty, "and to be… pleased, as well."

Rika froze. In that moment, she could not say that anything changed in the lines of his face, his body, or in his voice. He was like a statue, like a wall, like the dead marble of a coffin.

And yet there was something underneath. Whether or not it was kindness, she could not yet tell, but she could feel it next to the place where her soul rested in the air around her, and it told her to trust him. She looked at him again. She was still afraid to accept his words against every reason that she could think of, against every unanswered question stretching from 'Why am I here? Did you even know I was coming?' to 'Why would you want to adopt _me_?', yet she was also afflicted with the certainty that the man with silver in his hair did not mean to harm her.

Her self-appointed guardian stood and moved to the door. "Get some sleep," he told her. It sounded like a command and a dismissal, but she was still overwhelmed with questions.

"Wait!" she cried out. "If I'm your ward, then what does that mean?"

The hand on the door handle stilled. "You will live with me," Sesshoumaru answered.

"In what way?" she asked. Trepidation found its way into her voice as sick scenarios entered her mind. "How will I be known?"

The answer came immediately. "You will be called Rin," he said.

"Your… _Rin_?" She had been expecting a title, anything as innocent as 'child' and as dirty as 'mistress,' but not a name. "But my name is-"

"And my name is Lord Sesshoumaru."

With that, he turned off the lights to the room, and closed the door without saying _good-night. _Rika - or was it already Rin? - felt grateful that she would not have to echo the words 'good night' back without meaning it, because she knew that no words would help her find rest that evening. She could barely find enough sane and open space inside her mind to think.

As she lay on the soft mattress bed, her head lightly touching the pillows piled against the wall behind her, the events of the past twenty-four hours struggled to untangle themselves from the shock in her mind. She rubbed her chafed wrists, uneasy. Her dead mother became the contract became the brothel became her buyer's bedroom, and now the adoption.

Surely the last event in the series meant that her trauma was coming to an end. After everything, she could finally allow herself to let go of the adrenaline and find relief. To sleep without fear. But as soon as she began to recollect the day's events, Rika was nearly overpowered with grief. She would never be going back to the apartment she and her mother had shared in the _Buraku_, never eat a stick of ice cream with her outside a convenient store on a hot summer day_._ It felt like the end of her life.

And of _Rika's_ life.

She brought a hand to her chest. A change was already taking her over, on some spiritual level, and it had begun happening from the moment Sesshoumaru had given her new name. It was as though the gift of a name had drawn a dividing line between her lives, separating one from the next. Come sunrise, she would cross over that line and become Rin.

But for now, while the veil of night hung thick around her like a canopy inside the unfamiliar room, she was Rika for just a while longer. And she wept for her mother, her captivity and her freedom, her fear and for her weeping. And at last she wept out the last of her consciousness and fell into troubled dreams.

.

*35 _man_ was worth somewhere around $30,000 at the US$ exchange rate in 2006

*_bijin - _a "beauty"

*_kachou _- a company head, or boss

*_salary man - _term for "white-collar worker" or businessman


	3. Chapter 3

Currently looking for a beta. Any interest? Thank you all for your reviews and encouragement so far!

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**Bird on a wire**

_._

_three_

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_**February 5, 2006 - **__Day_

_Rin_

The next morning, she was woken by bright sunlight pouring in through the sheer gauze of a curtain. She had never experienced anything like it, having grown up in apartments crowded between buildings with too little space to breathe, much less to see the sky. As such, she was unable to do anything but burrow her face into her sheets, trying to pretend at being asleep and hoping that her body would not catch on to the ruse.

She was not sure how much time passed as she laid on the bed, trapped between sleeping and waking, before the door opened to her room and a man cleared his voice throatily.

"Wake up, Rin," he said, "You'll miss breakfast if you don't."

She immediately sat upright and rubbed her eyes, assessing the situation as best as she could as she came into consciousness. Her sheets were tangled around her legs, but at least her clothes, and her modesty were still intact. It was more than she had hoped for when she had first been led into the bedroom.

"Good morning. Where is Sess… Sesshoumaru-san?" she asked, trying the name out on her lips. It felt awkward, but perhaps that was just the fault of early morning.

"Work, of course," said the little man with a huff. She tried to remember his name, too, but found it had stuck in her memory less well.

"Oh, I see. Thank you, then… Jankenpon*?"

"_Jaken!_" he answered, furious. "My name is Jaken!"

"Sorry-" she tried to apologize, but the man was having none of it. He waved his eyes around, and said with a choked voice, "And the least you could do is be _respectful _about how you use it!"

"I'm sorry, I don't actually remember Sesshoumaru-sama saying your name respectfully at all," she mentioned as she slipped out of bed, not really thinking as she did so. She was too busy pressing the pads of her feet to the ground, feeling the carpet with interest. She had never walked barefoot on carpet before, and found that she rather liked the soft feeling between her toes.

"What?_!_" Jaken cried out. Rin wondered if she should regret her behavior, but then she took in the expression on the man's face and had to stifle a laugh. His bulging eyes were just as absurd as she had thought them the night before, but while it had made her feel sick to the stomach then, now it was merely humorous. And as such, the humor made it easy to sense that the little man, much like the so-called _Lord _Sesshoumaru, posed no threat to her.

She approached him and cleared her throat much like he had done for her less than a minute earlier. "Excuse me," she said. "But I heard there was breakfast?"

"Ah, yes. That. Come." Jaken shuffled from the doorway, opening the entrance and giving Rin her first view of the apartment.

She halted in place, finding herself unable to move.

"Is something _wrong_?" Jaken grunted at her.

"No," Rin said, overcome by a sense of awe. "I was just… surprised to see the room."

Although it had not been so obvious at the time, Rin could now see that she had been whisked from a brothel to a palatial penthouse. The night before, she had been too anxious, too riddled with shock and fear to notice anything around her when Jaken had dragged her inside. Yet now she could not help but observe that the apartment was massive and beautiful. It seemed to be directly appropriated from a designer's magazine. The hallway gave itself over to a wide and spread-out living room with black furniture probably picked in equal parts for affected elegance and slick utility. The clean lines of the room's contents kept the obvious luxury from being too overbearing. One wall hosted a massive shelf, brimming with concisely arranged books and antique objects, and the space around it was dark wood paneling. The flat hardwood floor gleamed in all directions, though a thin rug had been laid down before the sofas like an after thought, as if in recognition that the space was too harsh even for itself.

The windows, however, were the thing that had truly captured Rin's attention. Half of the room was walled by windows, and one of those sides held a balcony complete with furniture and shrubs. Rin spent a few long moments reminding herself to breathe as she took in the view of the sky. It was a pale blue, soft as a baby's blanket, giving over to a grayish haze where the tips of towers and skyscrapers met near the ground. She moved across the room single-mindedly, and once she reached the balcony door, she pressed her nose against the pane. Looking out, looking _down, _everything seemed small and removed from her, far away beyond the glass. As far away as if she were watching from the screen of a television. As if there was reality and there were images, and both could not be equally real.

The feeling was only intensified as she remembered the room within which she stood, the man and the circumstances that had brought her there - and the reason that she remained.

"Where am I?" she asked her companion with equal parts wonder and trepidation.

"You are in the apartment of Lord Sesshoumaru, of course."

"It just belongs to him?"

"I _sometimes _sleep in the study," said Jaken with obvious pride.

"He lives here alone, then…"

"Didn't I just make that fact abundantly clear?"

"You did. I was just mulling over it aloud," Rin answered as she caught eye of the kitchen table. She walked past her host, half-mindlessly carried by her feet as she took in the room and the magnitude of its' luxury. "There's just.. so much space here for one person. He must get lonely with all of this space to himself."

Jaken snorted. "Hardly. My master is quite independent, powerful, and wealthy. Surely you noticed all of that last night when he came in? And yet you're acting like you expected to find yourself in a hovel. It's appallingly offensive and-"

"I had no idea what to expect, and I wasn't exactly in the best situation to take things in, you know."

"Ha!" Jaken seemed to have loved this answer, as he pounced on it with a manic gleam in his eye. "You really must not have brains in your head. Or did you think that just any old benefactor could both purchase and be willing to raise a girl on a whim?"

"I hadn't thought of it at all," Rin answered truthfully. She would have stopped at that, but the servant's condescension and pomp was bringing out the worst of her. "But since I only _just _woke up at your request, there hasn't been much time to think over everything that has happened to me lately," she added.

The man's mood quickly switched to melancholy. "I suppose not. It's funny you should say that, actually; I've had only too much time to think it over…"

Rin couldn't follow his thought process at all. "Sorry?"

"Nothing, nothing." Jaken shook his head. "Go and eat. You need breakfast, don't you?"

"Of course. Most people do," answered Rin practically. She looked at the table in the middle of the living room and asked as politely as she could, "What is for breakfast this morning?"

"Whatever you want. Oh, but you're staring at me! Did you think I was putting breakfast on for you? You're not a _guest _here!"

"I suppose not," Rin grumbled as she went behind the island, and found the sleek-paneled refrigerator. She opened it and saw things she had never seen before. That is to say, none of it had brands. There were simply ceramic and simple-glazed containers and jars of all sizes piled neatly inside of the fridge. On close inspection, she realized that they were all homemade foodstuffs of Japanese origin. And yet they were all so beautiful, so obviously expensive, and organic and so _natural _that they might as well have been foreign foods.

"I don't know what to do with all of this," she said, uneasily. "I've never cooked anything that wasn't microwavable before." Now that she thought of it, there wasn't a microwave in sight. What _was_ she going to do?

Apparently, her companion was thinking along the same lines, for as he began to pull out several items from the shelves - an action which required much jumping - he said, "Don't think I'm making a habit out of this."

"Thank you, Jaken-san."

Rin sat down at the place setting and waited, uncertain of how to behave. She was sure that her manners could not possibly hold up under close scrutiny. Fortunately, there were plenty of other glinting, crystal things in the room to preoccupy her attention, and she let them distract her until a cloudy miso soup was presented before her alongside a heaping bowl of rice.

"Thank you," she said respectfully, avoiding the silverware as she reached for the dark-as-night chopsticks laid out on the rest. As she picked them up, she was startled to find that they were heavy in her hands. She'd never held lacquer-made chopsticks before, and she turned them in her hands. There was an ornate oyster shell pattern on the fat end of them, that looked like a crescent moon. Feeling Jaken's eyes on her, however, she ceased her inspection, stirred the soup and took her first sip, careful to catch plenty of seaweed on the way down.

"It's good!" she exclaimed. "This is exactly how I like it!"

Jaken revealed a speck of pride. "I remembered it correctly, then?"

"Remembered what?"

"Nothing!" he barked, apparently alarmed. "The tea! You need tea with your meal!"

_He sure is excitable_, thought Rin to herself as he blustered through the kitchen, acting as if he barely knew what he was doing in it. He kept opening the same cupboard and closing it again, apparently unable to find the ingredients he needed. She felt a smile creeping onto her face. Her mother had also never -

_Not 'my' mother. Rika's mother. Who is dead, just like Rika._

"Jaken-san," Rin asked over the increasing racket from the cupboards behind the counter, "What is Sesshoumaru-san doing today?"

"Work, obviously."

"Why aren't you at work too?"

A few pots clanged together. "My job is to be wherever my services are required of Lord Sesshoumaru."

"So you're working right now?" queried Rin. "Does that make you his… butler?"

"What!" Jaken sputtered and emerged from behind the island. "No, of course not!"

"Then are you his servant?"

"Not as such! I am a loyal friend of his family, in whom he can put the highest confidence…"

"That sounds a lot like a quote from_ Bushido_," she commented as she swished the dregs of her soup in her bowl. She was fascinated by the way the light sparkled off of the gold paint rim that had been glazed into the porcelain. It _was _gold, wasn't it?

"It's not entirely different. My relationship with the sons of Inutaisho has roots in the very beginning of the feudal era!" Jaken's mood had swung now to most definitely nostalgic. Rin found it surprisingly entertaining to watch.

"So, the Inutaisho is an old family," she guessed, and brought the bowl to her mouth for a final, drawn-out sip.

"_Your _family is Inutaishonow, too, and you'd do well to remember it."

"Ah." Rin put down her now-empty bowl on the table with an inelegant clatter. Remembering her manners, she blushed slightly as she said, "_Gochisou-sama deshita*."_

"There are responsibilities that come with your new family, whether you realize it or not. There are certain manners of behavior that are respected, and-"

"And your job will be to teach me?" Rin looked at the little bald man skeptically. He was old, so it wasn't polite to be disrespectful, but she wondered how much he knew about what was socially estimable for young people, much less for girls.

"Only some things. I expect that Lord Sesshoumaru wants to do most of it this ti-"

"In spite of his job?" Rin interrupted. "I thought work wasn't like that. Most of my friend's dads were always out late at night, and they left early in the mornings, too."

"Yes, that is a fair point. Sesshoumaru doesn't come back some evenings; he's a very powerful man and quite busy. But only, it seems, when he wants to be."

The only type of person she had ever known with those qualities were the scum of the Buraku, the people who only worked part time or just enough to get by… and sometimes not even that. She wondered what that made her new master, Sesshoumaru._ What sort of person was he to do whatever he wanted?_ she wanted to ask. But Jaken was now avoiding her eye, and on his face was an expression both literally and metaphorically tight-lipped. Rin stood up, and stretched her arms as her body was overtaken by a yawn. As she felt her top rise up, and her midriff suddenly become exposed to the air, it struck her - with some embarrassment - she was still wearing Rika's school uniform from the day before. And it was still covered in bold red stains.

Confronted with the evidence of blood and death, memories slammed back into her body with all the strength with which she had been fending it off. Had it really just been yesterday morning that Rika had tied the knot of her scarf against the curve of her neck, as if she were planning to go on to school as usual - as if she could have avoided her fate? As if her mother hadn't been slowly rotting away on the floor?

She felt sick immediately. the world seemed to press into a single point before her eyes and blacked at the corners. Unable to do anything else, she reseated herself with shaking hands.

"Rin?"

Jaken's voice barely penetrated her awareness. She closed her eyes and concentrated as hard as she could to push the woozy shot of pain deep down inside of herself once more.

"Are you ill?" he continued, and now that Rin was recovering, she could tell he sounded less worried than simply uncomfortable.

"No, I'm fine. I… I was just thinking. Why did Sesshoumaru-san want me?"

Jaken shifted on the ottoman where he'd been seated with the paper, and drew the wide sheets up over his face, absconding himself from her sight. "You'll have to ask him yourself," he grunted.

"You don't think he'll change his mind, do you?"

"Ha!" The newspaper rippled with the gust of air from Jaken's mouth. "It would be an affront to Lord Sesshoumaru's character to imply that he would do such a thing."

"But… I don't know why he chose to take me in at all. And I don't want him to stop… To regret bringing me here."

"He won't-" Jaken began, but Rin wouldn't have it. She went up to him and pulled down the paper from under his nose, desperate to see whether there was truth or not on his face.

"Can you tell me how I can do that?" she asked, looking into his yellowish eyes beseechingly. "I don't want to go back to that place where you found me. Jaken-san, I don't have an old home to return to… I don't have a life, I don't have anyone else!"

"I told you, you don't have anything to worry about. Just be yourself, Rin. Be happy." When Rin didn't put forth her immediate assent, Jaken grumpily expanded, "And stop looking the gift horse in the mouth."

.

_Jaken_

"I know where were are," said Rin all of a sudden. "I went on a school trip here once last year."

Jaken had just walked her out of the elevator lobby onto a platform overlooking the Hillside shopping center. The thin waterfall curtain gave way to a covert entrance from the Residence into the mall. He was, as always unimpressed as he passed by a line of leafy ferns swaying gently over a shallow water feature, but Rin seemed entranced by every bit of it. He shouldn't have been surprised, as he had always thought her to be exceedingly curious and easily pleased, but after five-hundred years he wasn't sure anymore what was his memory or what was his imagination when it came to such little things. Add to that the fact that this Rin did not share the memories of the old Rin, and Jaken was at a loss to know how familiar her personality could even be, _assuming _that Sesshoumaru was correct, and this girl was truly Rin's reincarnation. In his limited experience, sharing a soul did not necessitate sharing personalities, characters, or interests. Yet Rin was trailing behind him, light-footed and bold as ever. It was incomprehensible to Jaken for those reasons, and more besides.

"You went here on a school trip?" he repeated, disbelieving, "I fail to see what could have been educational about shopping…"

"Of course they didn't take us here just for _that_. We went to the top of Mori Tower to see an art exhibit, and then to see the skyline. My teachers said the view is better than the one from Tokyo Tower, but it was cloudy that day. We couldn't see Fuji… We could barely even see to Shinjuku."

"At least you you still got to view the gallery," Jaken said dryly, "while you were up there. It's world-class, after all."

Rin shook her head. "I didn't pay much attention to the pictures. They weren't pleasant, as I remember it."

"Keh. Not pleasant. Was it inappropriate subject matter for children?"

"Probably not for most people. They were just pictures of birds and flowers, mostly."

Jaken turned to Rin, struggling to believe what she had just told him. "How could that be unpleasant! You like those stupid things, don't you?"

"I do," Rin agreed earnestly, "Except apparently not when it's in a _rinpa _exhibit."

"But you _like _rinpa style, too!" Jaken protested, his voice throaty. He remembered when Nobushou had come to the castle, all those years ago; when he, Jaken, had led the man to the end of the hall and let him set up his work station. The smell of paints and oils that rushed through the rooms when shoji doors slid open. How he had dipped his brush into that color of paint like swirling waters, and brushed a perfect crane at the edge of a pond for Rin's personal rooms, and Rin had clapped her hands in delight. _"It's gorgeous," _she had said to Sesshoumaru, her hands clutching the ends of her _furisode_ as she ran to him as fast as the layers of her kimono would allow. _"I love the mural so much, Sesshoumaru-sama! It makes me feel-"_

"-like they're dead. They're so flat and lifeless, like they'll never move again. And there's nothing worse than that." Rin paused to observe the storefronts as they descended on an escalator. "Anyway, it's all so beautiful in _here_," she stated. "The staircases seem to descend from the sky. It hardly feels like we're outdoors, the way everything is so naturally lit. We could be in a forest glade somewhere, near caverns filled with water… Look, even the floors are clean. Don't you think so, Jaken-san?"

"I think you're not making any seen at all," he huffed. "Now, in we go. Right here."

She looked through the window pane of the storefront curiously. "What, here? But this is only the first store we've passed."

"And it sells clothes, doesn't it?" said Jaken matter-of-factly. He made to enter, but Rin reached out and held him by the back of his shirt collar. The scents cloying to the edge of her sleeve were too much for him; they reminded him of too many dirty things he had left to rest in the past. And then her hand itself - it was like the branch of a tree log catching on his hem while he swam underwater, keeping him from breaking through to the surface. He struggled to move; to breathe as she cried out, "Jaken, no! I, I couldn't!"

"Let go of me!" he managed at last.

Thankfully her hand pulled back, and Jaken inhaled deeply, feeling the air stir in his lungs properly again.

"Couldn't do _what?_" he demanded.

"Shop here," she said, with obvious embarrassment. "I can't afford it."

But Jaken felt that his patience had come to an end. "Rin, I have to take you shopping! You can't stay in those filthy, immodest rags of yours any longer!"

"I know they're dirty, but I can clean them off if you give me a chance. You don't need to buy me anything. Maybe we can plead with my old landlord to give me my old wardrobe back-"

He had suggested the exact same thing to Lord Sesshoumaru, only to be greeted with telling silence. Obviously, he had considered the option, and not found it satisfactory.

"I don't want to impose-"

"You will impose the least if you are more appropriately dressed. My Lord and master insisted upon clothing you himself."

"Then why do we have to go to this store? It's so… elegant." She pointed to the shopfront, where a photo of a foreign woman posing seductively in silk had been blown up to a massive size, and the canvas behind her stretched out infinitely white, like possibilities or emptiness. "Besides, I don't even know how to _read _the name of this place."

"If I'm lucky, you won't be able to read the price tags, either," Jaken grumbled to himself. If Rin had overheard him, he didn't get the chance to find out. The shopkeepers had come out to greet them by this point, and they reeled his charge in like a fish on a line, flapping helplessly as she skimmed the top of the water with every desperate leap.

As he passed through the double doors that had been held open for him, Jaken glanced briefly at his reflection.

He saw himself as he really was, with bulging eyes and a jaw distended as it attempted to suck in air. He was green and speckly and he could see that he had been misjudging Rin unfairly.

_He_ was the fish (and even he had forgotten).

_._

_Sesshoumaru_

He arrived in the entry hall ten minutes behind the cooks. He had originally planned to go into his apartment before them, as he had left his office early enough to do so, but when he realized that Rin might be distracted by them, his pride got in the way. He would have Rin's attention without distraction. He had paid for his ward to be returned to him after so many years, and he intended to be rewarded with as much of her as she could fill in a single moment. He could not bear anything less.

Predictably, Jaken had sensed his youki when he ascended to the top floor of the building, and had rushed to greet him at the genkan.

"Welcome home, master!" he crowed, bending down obsequiously to grip Sesshoumaru's calf and gently tug his shoes off one by one. Sesshoumaru payed him the most minimal attention, instead seeking out Rin. She had not come to greet him, but he could sense her presence even before his eyes found out her shadow in the back of a lounge chair on the balcony beyond the living room.

The balcony door had been left cracked open, and a rush of cool air was leaking into the apartment, tangling with the warm interior. Sesshoumaru intended to slip out and join her silently, but as he brushed aside the pain, his claws tapped against the pane with four tightly joined _click_s. The noise momentarily jarred him, but a quick glance at his reflection confirmed that his disguise had otherwise held. He frowned, but put the matter aside for the moment to observe the girl in his charge.

She was quiet in her sleep. She had a book hanging loosely from her hand, as if she had fallen asleep in the midst of taking in a sentence. His Rin had never shown any particular interest in books, but neither had she made it to this Rin's age, nor had she ever learned to read. He took the book from Rin's hand and held it aloft. A quick flip through the pages revealed that it was not a book, but a _shoujo_ manga.

He marked her spot with the book flap, and keeping his eye on her face to assure himself that she would not stir, he set it down gently on the glass table beside her. Sesshoumaru had just finished doing this when the door opened and the quiet was broken by Jaken. He gracelessly shuffled out to them with the evening's _aperitifs - a _jug of chilled _sake_, two cups (one for Rin, he presumed), and several platters of soybeans and pickled vegetables sliced in the shapes of flowers.

"Here you are my Lord," said the kappa, his voice lowered to a whisper at what was obviously a great deal of pain to him. Sesshoumaru nodded and - though he was not well acquainted with doing so - sat down beside Rin on the other half of the set of lounge chairs. He sat stiffly, but not from the cold. The radiant warmth of the outdoor heater took care of that, and in fact left him feeling more naturally comfortable than he'd been indoors. Still, it was a long-established habit that he could not bring himself to lay down outdoors; at least, not while others were around him.

Yet he felt no small measure of peace. Her smell was already seeping into the fabric of the air around the house, and unlike the night before, it no longer was stained with fear. He looked at her and noticed for the first time that she had been purchased a change of clothes. Her legs were bare beneath a floral print dress that grazed the tops of her folded-up knees. A discarded denim jacket lay crumpled beneath her feet. She was barefoot. The edges of her rounded toenails shone dully like the tiny stamps of ten waning moons.

"Excuse me," Jaken squeaked. "Dinner is _served_."

Sesshoumaru had lost track of time as he had stared at Rin, transfixed. The sky had grown husky with twilight, but the ground was still bright and illuminated. It always was, but tonight it disconcerted him. Why were humans so fraught with illusions?

"Jaken."

"My Lord?"

"Has she not shown any signs?"

"Ah…" Jaken's eyes turned to Rin. ""Do you mean to ask if she has remembered any of her past?"

"Yes."

"This Jaken has not had such an impression _yet_, my Lord."

"I see." Sesshoumaru frowned slightly. He had expected only as much as this after the night before, when the girl had not recognized him even after learning his name. But if only her soul had been reborn, then why did she possess the same body, by all appearances; even the same scent?

Jaken interrupted his thoughts as if he were extending them from Sesshoumaru's own, the branch of a tree being grafted onto another. "Rin seems to not realize that she has been reincarnated," he interjected. "Nor has it occurred to her that we are not human. Compared to five hundred years ago, _we_ look more different now than even she does. Perhaps if we hinted…"

"No. I will take her to Higurashi," said Sesshoumaru, as the decision was being made in his mind. He stood. "I need to visit him as it stands."

Jaken nodded obsequiously. "It's my honor to arrange it, my Lord."

He bowed out a few more times, leaving Sesshoumaru a strange shadow looming over the sleeping girl. He touched his fingers together tightly, holding back his desire to reach out and grab her, to pull her roughly against himself. If only he could bring his sight, his hearing, his smell into accord with his touch and his taste, perhaps then he could bring himself to believe that she was truly before him, and his once more.

But he could not do it.

Rin hadn't moved once through their conversation, and the wind was so still that even the strands of her hair had stayed in place. She looked to him as if she had been prematurely treated to the hand of death, and it occurred to him that he was more used to thinking of her as dead than alive.

"Rin," he said sharply, and her eyelashes fluttered. "Are you awake?"

And so she stirred.

.

_*jankenpon - _The game called "Rock, Paper, Scissors"

_*gochisou-sama deshita - _Thank you for this meal


	4. Chapter 4

_Thanks to Vivian who betaed up until this chapter, and to Amku who will be my beta from the next chapter to the end! L P, please p.m. or email me! Your email address did not process properly when your review was posted. Sorry for all the weird formatting issues in earlier versions of the chapter.  
><em>

**.**

**Bird on a wire**

_._

_four_

.

_**February 6, 2006**  
>Rin<em>

Rin folded the edge of her nylon seat belt against her shoulder and watched Sesshoumaru under the shadows of her lashes. He had ceased typing messages into his phone and appeared to be looking out the window at the passing city. From her angle, she couldn't see his eyes behind his glasses, but as a creeping feeling rose on the back of her neck, she realized that he was watching her in the reflection as certainly as she was watching him.

"Umm, Sesshoumaru-san. I heard from Jaken-san that we are going to visit the priest of the Higurashi shrine."

"Yes. Higurashi Sota," came her answer. The short response came as little surprise; after all, Rin had already begun to learn that emotional flatness was a consistent trait of his. He had barely spoken at dinner the previous night after inquiring about her purchases, though it was obvious he noticed her presence. At least this is how it seemed to Rin. She had clung to her seat at the table, terrified that he would comment on her terrible table manners or find her new clothes unflattering or too expensive and demand they be returned. Only by dessert had she reached the conclusion that he wasn't angry with her, but that it was in his nature to watch new things in his environment with a steady, liquid amber gaze, and he simply didn't seem to care one way or another about what she did or didn't do.

But he was her guardian by his own insistence, and she was living in his home. _Her _new home. They were family, and surely that meant they could speak to one another, at least.

"So, how do you know Higurashi-boushi*?" she asked him conversationally.

"His sister married my half-brother," he answered, and Rin lit up.

"You have siblings?"

"No," said Sesshoumaru, tone flat. "He's dead."

Rin recoiled. "I'm sorry-" she began.

"Don't be. It was a long time ago. We were never close."

"It must have been hard, though, for his wife..."

"She is also dead."

"So young?" Rin asked before she could stop herself. Sesshoumaru appeared placid in spite of her outburst, but also as if he were lost in thought. Finally, he answered.

"Her family lost her before her time."

Rin had no idea what to say to that, so she went silent and wrapped the edge of her skirt around her knees as she shifted on her seat. The air conditioner and the sound of the engine seemed quiet from the black leather backseat of the car, as if it were pristine, a sanctuary from the street. Rin dwelled on her guardian's words, feeling as though she were missing something. Sesshoumaru had said that he had never been close to his half-brother, but if that were true, then why was he visiting someone as distantly related to him as his half-brother's widow's brother?

As the car ascended the expressway, Rin gazed out over the suburbs of western Tokyo. The roads unfolded in front of her like lines on a map, only they were buried by buildings, and she did not know where any of them led.

The arrival to their destination, however, was anything but anticlimactic. Higurashi shrine had been established on top of a hill, and, following, it was a large and imposing monument. Rin could see a tree towering from behind it, adding to the already impressive shrine an even grander impression of both age and permanence. Getting to the building commanded a show of humble mortal transience, which Rin was quickly reminded of after she was forced to climb hundreds of steps to meet her destination. When she arrived, she was slightly displeased to find that her host was already waiting for them, and only she was out of breath, but she tried not to let it show.

"So, your name is Rin?" asked the young priest as he waved her into the shrine proper. He couldn't be more than a few years older than her, Rin thought in wonder. His body wasn't as big or impressive as Sesshoumaru's, even though he seemed to have lean muscles and the height of an adult. He wore his shoulder length black hair in a low ponytail, which seemed way too _cool _for a priest, but from the way that he had greeted Sesshoumaru without smiling - with nothing more than a nod and a name, really - she was starting to feel that there was something strange about him beyond just his appearance.

"Yes. I am Inutaisho Rin," she answered politely, and to mask her disquiet she looked him straight in the eye. "Are you Higurashi-boushi? Sesshoumaru-san's relative?"

"Of course." The boy smiled, but then he looked just as taken aback. "Related? Well.. I guess we are."

Rin furrowed her brow. "You either are or you aren't, right?"

"Rin..." said Sesshoumaru with a warning note to his voice. But the priest just scratched his head.

"Yeah, I guess we're family after all. It's just… It's too much a part of the past for me to consider it often," said the priest faintly. He turned his attention, then, from her to his sister's brother-in-law. "I brought out the albums," he said to Sesshoumaru. "They're just inside if you'd like to take a look."

"I would prefer to take care of our other business first."

Rin clutched her hands behind her back and held them tightly as if the action could hold down her curiosity. What was Sesshoumaru talking about? If it was just 'business' business that he had come to the shrine for, it wouldn't make much sense for him to have brought her along.

"Rin."

"Yes?"

"Wait inside. We will be back shortly."

Rin watched the pair walk away.

She reluctantly entered the priest's family's two-storied house through a sliding door and found her way past the breakfast room into the living room, where she saw an inviting pale blue couch. No sooner than she had sat down and an old, fat calico cat rubbed against her legs. Rin leaned down and stretched out her hand to pat it on the head.

"Hello, dear," she said. But no sooner had she touched it than it began to totter on its paws, and meowing pathetically, plopped onto its side.

"Uh-"

"Don't mind him," came the voice of an old man from behind her. "He's an old, useless cat."

Rin sat up quickly. "I'm sorry, I-"

"Are you one of Kagome's friends?" asked the man. He was hunched over with grey, wandering eyes that reminded Rin suddenly of a dog she had met once in her apartment complex. It had been old and demented, but subtly. _Bent, _they had called him, because he had been hit once with a stick and never regained the proper shape to his mind.

"Pardon?" she asked. "…Kagome? Do you mean like the food brand?" asked Rin, racking her brain and coming up with no other guesses. The man tutted.

"No, no! Not that," he wailed as he walked around the couch, and settled in a chair across from Rin. "She was my granddaughter. A very kind girl."

"Oh! You mean Sesshoumaru's sister-in-law!" Rin exclaimed, and re-evaluated the man in front of her. Of course, he would have to be Kagome's, and the present shrine priest's, grandfather. "Do you have any pictures of her?"

"As a matter of fact, I do." The old man swept his hand out over the coffee table between them. "My son just took out some old wedding pictures this morning…"

Rin scooted to the edge of her cushion to take a better look. A large yellow book sat out on the coffee table beside a few untied scrolls with coffee stains over flowing script. She saw the English for "album" written in the corner, and realized that the book must be the same one as Sesshoumaru had requested Higurashi-boushi procure for him. On impulse, she picked up the photo album, and was surprised to find it quite light in her hand. "May I look at them?" she asked as she opened the cover. The old man's reply - probably affirmative and long-winded - was lost to her as she looked down at the first image.

Her legs felt weak, and she sat down on the low sofa that had nudged her at the back of her knees. Her eyes remained fixed to the photographs. They seemed both new and terribly old, like she had stumbled upon the pictures from a photo shoot of a period drama. A wedding party stood together in kimono and hakama, which in itself was not unusual. However, there were unnecessary anachronisms, like the topknot that the man in the corner wore, and the tall Buddhist staff in the the hand of the a purple-robed man.

"There's Kagome, of course." The proud grandfather pointed to the young woman in an intricate wedding kimono. She looked a lot like her brother, though more tired. Her hair was obviously very long.

"And there's her husband, Inuyasha."

Rin peered at the groom skeptically. He was good-looking enough, and in shape, but he appeared to be wearing a strange costume. He had white hair, even longer than his wife, and some sort of strange hat on that made it look as if he were wearing cat ears. In spite of all of it, for some reason, Rin felt a rush of disappointment. It were as if the man were missing something, as if he had just fallen short of some expectation she hadn't known she'd had.

"He doesn't look much like his brother," Rin said. "His brother is Sesshoumaru-san, isn't it?"

"Sesshouma-who?"

Rin shook her head and moved on, bringing her finger to the plastic veneer over the photo to trace face after solemn face. "Where are you and Higurashi-boushi?" she asked. "And the rest of Kagome's family?"

The old man's face, which had been filled with pride, drooped. "We weren't invited to the ceremony," he lamented.

"Oh. I'm… I'm sorry," Rin said sincerely. Yet it made sense, now that she thought about it. If Kagome had been estranged from her family, that would probably explain why Higurashi-boushi hadn't been quick to call Sesshoumaru his relative. Rin turned the page to uncover a photo of the married couple standing together at the bottom of a flight of stone-hewn stairs.

"This is the shrine," said Rin, pointing.

"Yes, yes." Kagome's grandfather rubbed the skin around his foggy brown eyes, and his wrinkles lengthened. "It looks more or less the same even now, isn't it? Even after five hundred years, give or take a few..."

"Five hundred years?" Rin furrowed her brow.

"Why, that's when the picture was taken, mind you-"

"Ah! Grandpa's telling tales again, isn't he?" interrupted a mild voice from behind the couch. Rin spun around, slamming the album shut as if she had been caught red-handed in a cookie jar. A tall, auburn-haired boy stood behind the couch with folded arms and a wide, tight-lipped smile underneath sparkling sea-green eyes. "These pictures were from the matsuri* a few years back, weren't they?"

Rin found herself captivated by the man who'd just come into the room. He appeared to be somewhere around Higurashi-boushi's age, or maybe even a few years younger. His face was clearer, paler, and his features more refined. Her interest in him stemmed from an undefinable similarity to Sesshoumaru that he possessed. Was he foreign, maybe? Like the image of the bizarrely wigged half-brother, it troubled her as much as it excited her.

"Telling tales!" Grandpa protested meanwhile. "_I would never_! I'm telling Kagome's friend about the wedding!"

"Oh. You knew Kagome, too?" the man's eyes softened as he looked at her, and Rin felt a pang of sympathy. He obviously had known and been fond of the dead girl in the photographs. Rin shook her head, seeing no recourse but the truth.

"No, I don't - _didn't_ - actually know Kagome," she revealed. "Grandpa just assumed…"

"Then, in that case, I bet these pictures aren't interesting to you." The boy's sentimental moment vanished as he gave her a friendly wink. "We might as well just put them away and introduce ourselves. I'm Shippo."

"Nice to meet you," said Rin, her thoughts still struggling to sort themselves out as he inclined his head to her in introduction.

"Grandpa here sometimes loses track of what's what," the boy explained. Grandpa sat muttering to himself on his chair, his weathered hand resting on the photo album as if it tenderly protect it. Rin knew for certain in that moment that whether the pictures had been from a wedding or a matsuri made little difference. She didn't want to see any more pictures that made her feel so lost. She rose to her feet, her hands fisted at her sides.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But I feel kind of ill. I'm going to go back to the car and wait there. Please tell Sesshoumaru-san for me."

"Sure, we'll tell him," the red-headed boy allowed in obvious confusion. He walked around the couch to join her. "Is there anything we can do? Give you some painkiller, maybe?"

"I know a few herbal remedies that-" The old man started, sounding ready to rattle off from memory a page from an ancient cookbook, but Rin cut him off.

"No, it's fine. Thank you."

She hurried to the door, and stepped out into the cloudy day, her heart pounding. She looked around. The shrine grounds were static and austere, without a single petitioner in sight. A thick-trunked tree held a solemn vigil in the center of the courtyard. Rin suspected that just as it had watched over Kagome and her husband at their marriage ceremony (or the festival, or whatever it was), that it was fixing her, too, with its ancient spirit eyes.

Rin turned away from it quickly, as her discomfort grew. She felt as if something was being hid from her, just beyond the gates and buildings, but she couldn't work out _what. _Nor could she work out why, when she'd looked at the pictures in the album, she'd had the feeling that the truth might just burst out from inside of her.

.

_Jaken_

The pocket of Jaken's private world collapsed from around him like a punctured tire when the back door of the short limousine opened without warning. As a small human girl slipped into the backseat with a drawn-out sigh, Jaken rushed to close his magazine.

"Rin!" he exclaimed shrilly over the _enka _music on the radio. "You're back early!"

She collapsed in the backseat with a drawn-out sigh. Jaken saw from his rear view mirror that she had a drawn, wan look to her face. When she did not immediately reply, he craned his neck to see her with his own eyes. "…Rin?"

"Hello Jaken," she said to him quietly. "Can you take me to a vending machine or a convenient store for a drink? I'm really thirsty."

"There's water in the back seat."

With a nod, Rin opened the ice cooler between the two back seats and began scooping ice pellets into one of the glass cups. Jaken watched greedily, his head still turned over his shoulder as far as it could go. Human's use of ice in drinks had always seemed to him like one of their better ideas. Seeing ice in a cup reminded him of the taste of icicle tips hanging over the edge of a river bank at winter. He could feel, as if it were something he could taste on the back of his tongue, the chilly peace that always covered his banks as dew frosted over exposed river rocks in the mornings.

"Jaken." The girl leaned forward in her seat, her posture beseeching. He knew the words she would ask before they came off of her lips.

"He is not back yet," he interrupted her. "My master, Sesshoumaru-sama, should be back shortly. He's usually gone no longer than twenty minutes for these visits. After all, he keeps a very tight schedule."

"But that seems too short," Rin frowned, sitting back with a petulant air. "After all, isn't he visiting his family? I would expect they would have a lot to talk about when they saw each other…"

Jaken took out a cloth from an inner pocket of his jacket and used it to polish his glasses. "No, they don't. They are very different from us," he said vaguely.

"How so?"

_They're human_, Jaken wanted to say, but the promise he'd made to his lord kept the words shut up in his throat. A sneaky idea, however, wormed its way into his head. "What do you know about Lord Sesshoumaru?" he re-directed her.

"He's my guardian," Rin answered. "Why?"

"And is that all you can say about him?" he prodded. "Any other attributes of note?"

Jaken took satisfaction in the confusion that briefly crossed over her face as a result of his words. "He's… reticent," she said eventually.

"Hmm. Interesting that you would say that even now, when you should have gotten to know him better over the past few days. All the same, you're right. But he used to be much _more_ sullen, and less kind. He has changed over the years in many ways."

Rin snapped her fingers. "That's right! You've known him and his family for a long time, haven't you, Jaken. What sort of a man is he?"

Jaken's feathers were ruffled by this, of course. He would never stoop to calling his Master a _man_. The idea of it offended him so deeply that he felt bile rising in the back of his throat, and he had to grab onto the steering wheel to steady himself. If only his lord would allow him to tell Rin the truth… To show her the awesome power that their Master wielded, and how much he deserved their respect...

If only his lord would tell her, instead of forcing him to speak in riddles that no longer came to him so easily as they had in his past.

"My master surpasses any other I have ever met. I would be honored to die again for Lord Sesshoumaru," he declared. "A thousand times, if it were necessary."

"I don't mean to pry, but I was wondering… Sesshoumaru-san saved you too, didn't he?"

"Yes," Jaken managed, trying to sound nonplussed. But he was floored.

He was being held by the skin of his neck, covered in beads of sweat erupting from his pores. Like his own pool of water. The air was catching on his webbed toes, dangling above the ground. He closed his eyes, too ashamed to face the one whom had bested his skill and was going to murder him and his clan; for this, at least, he deserved to die. But then a whip came out from the darkness, swinging out like a fishing line and catching onto his captor, blasting him into tiny specks of light. A life for a life and Jaken was free to continue ruling his people. Yet in that glorious, darkest moment, he knew that he had been saved to serve.

And somehow, Rin could see the mark of that event in him. She had known without ever even being told of Sesshoumaru's inhuman strength of muscle and of spirit. _She had always been so astute for a human._

"What did you say?" Rin looked at him, puzzled.

Snapped from his reverie, Jaken echoed in her confusion. "…What?" he asked her groggily."

My 'being human'. What does that have to do with anything?"

"Err…" Jaken couldn't remember saying that at all, and pulled at the tie around his neck nervously. Why did the car suddenly feel so hot?

"…I don't know what you're talking abut, you foolish girl," he scoffed, masking his discomfort. "I didn't say anything like that, except… Ah! Look over there! It's Lord Sesshoumaru!"

Predictably, Rin whipped her head toward the car window, and Jaken straightened in his seat, placing his hands firmly on the sides of the wheel. And so he had been again. His Lord was advancing toward them, his gait flowing like the surface of a placid river, the soles of his feet constantly a half-centimeter above the ground - a singular example of his perfect power under tight control. And control was the most precious salvation that Jaken could imagine.

In his leather briefcase, Jaken knew, Sesshoumaru carried precious gifts in tow for the both of them. Gifts that would keep Rin from ever needing to ask what it mattered to be human or not. Gifts that would keep everyone from asking.

.

Sesshoumaru

As much as Sesshoumaru preferred working with Sota Higurashi-boushi, especially as opposed to the boy's now-retired grandfather, he never felt quite _right _after their meetings. It reminded him of the feeling of being gouged out by a demon's sword; of standing too close to a priestess with an arrow pulled back tightly on her bow. Had it not been absolutely necessary, he would have never submitted himself to a spiritual onslaught that made him feel and look so _weak._ But his white flag had gone up with the rising of wide, black sails on the ocean horizons off of Shizuoka a century and a half ago.

Power, he reminded himself, was more lethal when it was kept in reserve, to be unleashed at the proper time, and in the proper way. It had never been wrapped up in his physical strength alone, and this is what protected him where it had failed so many others. He was capable of change, if not humility in the wake of forces larger than himself. He had yet to encounter such a force more than once in his life, and she sat beside him in the back of a pitch-black Bentley that careened through his lands, restless and cold beneath layers of concrete and waste.

A fang hanging from his necklace itched awkwardly as it laid upon his chest, reminding him incidentally that he had not been ruling so well as he would have liked.

When Jaken reached the corner of Roppongi Hills avenue and the lower strip of the mall an hour later, Sesshoumaru signaled him to pull over. "Rin," he said as his car door automatically swung open. "We will walk back from here."

The girl was evidently stunned by his sudden address, but scrambled out of the side of the car, hardly aware of the danger of passing vehicles. "Bye, Jaken," she called out before closing the door firmly behind herself.

He joined her on the sidewalk and took a moment to observe her as he could not while she had faced away from him toward the window. She was bundled up in a scarf that reached all the way to her chin. She looked tired, but not cold; the smell of a light sweat on her brow and her hands revealed that she was anxious.

He came to her side and they began walking together.

It was early afternoon now. The number of humans in suits had increased, as it was the end of their lunch hours and they had to return to their work. The study resumed much like every other day that Sesshoumaru walked the Hill. The salarymen looked burdened beyond their years, though he passed a few of them dragging cigarettes and laughing with their coworkers so enthusiastically that it seemed as if they hung the value of their existence upon the act itself. He watched the women prowling in stiletto boots, with painstakingly coifed long hair and designer purses hanging off of their shoulders. It was more than they could afford, he reflected, all of it; the endless pursuit of beauty stole from them a few hours every day of their already fleeting youth. The sense of emptiness, the meaninglessness, and the despair laid over all of the humans - men and women alike - like a background haze. It was this alone that hadn't changed over the hundreds of years he had been alive. Human life, in whatever form those lives ultimately took, was doomed from the start.

And then, of course, there was Rin.

He stared at his charge, at the top of her head where the ebony hairs broke out from the skin of her scalp and caught in the sun, shining vividly. She had done nothing to make it so bright except to follow him from the car into the sunlight. She was different from those other humans, he thought fiercely. If only because she was his.

_Why?_

"You have been very quiet," he said finally. Rin did not immediately meet his eyes, but instead her gaze wandered from tree to tree.

"I've been thinking."

"What about?"

"Different things…" she trailed off. Frustrated, Sesshoumaru tried again.

"You may… talk around me," he said.

"About what?"

"Anything that pleases you."

"Anything?" Rin now paused in her step, turning to look directly into his eyes. He was taken aback by the boldness of the action just for a moment before the feeling was replaced with pride when he realized that she was unabashedly observing him as he had been doing to her all day. He stared back at her, waiting for her to finish her last she nodded, her lips pursed as a result of her deep consideration. "You know," she said finally. "Your eyes are actually quite a strange shape, almost cat like. It seems as if they could see right inside of me."

"They cannot."

She laughed, not bothering to cover her mouth as she did. "I'm glad to hear it. But are you sure you won't be upset if I just… just talk about stupid things? Really, most boys I know hate it when girls just go off and..."

"I am not a _boy_," Sesshoumaru answered simply, unwilling to mask his disdain. Rin, however, didn't seem to be bothered by his frown, but smiled up at him anyway.

"I know that," she said, more softly, "But I'm not really sure what a man is like either. I didn't grow up with a father, though some of my friends used to say that it didn't make much difference, because they barely saw them."

Rin rubbed her hands together. Sesshoumaru wondered if she had become cold, and was considering the merits of offering her something of his for her to wear when she asked him, "Did you know your father well?"

The question was so abrupt that it took Sesshoumaru a moment to properly contemplate.

"Yes. As well as I could have, perhaps."

"What was he like? A man's man, I bet."

Sesshoumaru wasn't familiar with the expression. Neither was he familiar with contemplating his father. He remembered his father with some frequency - he couldn't help it, now that he lived so immersed in the world of humans that his father had loved and fought to protect - but he had spent little time pondering his father's character.

"You don't remember?" Rin asked after his long silence.

"No, I do. My father was... charming."

"So you take after your mother," Rin said, giving him an outrageous smirk. But while Sesshoumaru humored her - to be honest, he was amused - soon after the words had left her lips, her teasing expression faded. The conversation wavered and threatened to fall apart. Rin continued walking beside him, but now she did so in a closed-off sort of way, looking around herself - and particularly at her feet - with a strange and unsettling expression that appeared to be one of loss. Sesshoumaru imagined he might have once understood what Rin was thinking, just from context alone, but he had long ago forgotten how to read the meaning in her eyes. He worried that the conversation was going to slip away, and that she would, too. So he reached out to the first thing that came to his mind - besides the rebuttal, _'As a matter of fact, I take after my father increasingly, and not for reasons of charm.'_

"What do you like doing?" he asked her.

"You mean for fun?"

Sesshoumaru couldn't think of how else the question could be interpreted, so he remained silent.

"Well..." Rin admitted slowly as they passed under the barren canopy of an oak tree. "I do like taking walks."

.

*the suffix -boushi refers to a priest

*matsuri - a festival


	5. Chapter 5

Thanks goes to all of my readers who left me with reviews, and especially to my prompt, thorough, and hard-working beta readers, **Amku** and **Liza P**. :) Thanks to them this will be the best chapter yet! :)

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**Bird on a wire**

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_five_

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_**February 21, 2006  
><strong>Jaken_

He was sorting the mail when he found that the package he had been waiting for had come at last, emblazoned with the seal of the Minato ward.

With a careful slash of an envelope knife, Jaken broke the seal and released the paperwork inside. Pages and pages of kanji spilled in front of him in duplicate and triplicate. As he adjusted his reading glasses, he couldn't help thinking that things used to be so much simpler before humans invented bureaucracy. Taking the first page in hand, he deciphered the first lines with some difficulty.

_Pending the certification of Ms. Nakamura Reiko's death and burial, the Minato ward office is prepared to formalize the adoption of Ms. Nakamura Rika…_

His eyes began to water, and he rubbed them furiously. However, the streams would not stop. They were flowing like they hoped to someday meet the sea, and were compelled to escape his overfilled eyes. At that moment, Sesshoumaru walked out from his study and Jaken redoubled his efforts to clear his vision, but Sesshoumaru passed him without even glancing in his direction.

Of course, this wouldn't do. "Sesshoumaru-sama!" he squeaked, wiping at his face. "The adoption papers have come."

His Lord paused mid-step, and turned to Jaken in a single graceful motion. He looked vaguely pleased. "Take care of them," he instructed.

"I am working on it, my Lord. But there is one thing. Her education…"

"Is irrelevant."

Jaken cringed. "Legally, Sesshoumaru-sama, she has to continue schooling at least until her fifteenth birthday. She has been absent from her school for some weeks now. It would not _look _good if we were to…"

Sesshoumaru raised a hand dismissively. "Then find her a tutor."

The words, _but where can this Jaken find a tutor? And for what sort of things?_ formed on his lips, but he barely managed to repress it. Sesshoumaru did not seem to notice. He had instead turned from the dining room table where he'd set up shop and was facing the hallway that linked his and Rin's bedrooms.

"Rin."

"_Coming!_" The black-haired girl dashed out from the open door of her room, pulling on her pea coat as she went. "Sorry, I was just watching this flash video on Youtube and I didn't even realize it was time to go on our walk!"

She pulled a face at Jaken. "Thanks for telling me, by the way!"

"I'm not your alarm clock, girl!" he protested to her impish grin.

"Do you need a watch?" Jaken overheard Sesshoumaru ask as the pair entered the genkan. Only as Sesshoumaru bent down to put on his shoes did Jaken suffer a jolt of realization. _He had failed his master. _Never, in decades upon centuries, had he forgotten to perform the task for his master when he had been available! Never had his master neglected to call on him to accomplish such needs! Twin rivers threatened to burst forth from the edges of Jaken's eyes again, but he tried to redirect them with his hands, making little eddies with the sweeping motion of his fingers. It wouldn't do, he thought to himself, if he got the paperwork wet.

Jaken sighed wetly once the elevator had carried them away, down the long, long vertical lane of the elevator shaft. His emotions back under control, he went back to his papers, inscribing the name _Inutaisho Rin _on empty lines time after time in the silence.

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**_February 27, 2006  
><em>**_Rin_

Hatsuzawa Aya, Rin's new tutor, arrived in the elevator lobby with peach-colored roll-away luggage and a quick-flashing smile. The twenty-one year old looked more at-ease than anyone Rin had ever met, and with the way she looked, she deserved to be. Rin was convinced that her teacher had just woken up that morning with her makeup perfectly smoothed onto her face, her short bob naturally falling into its somewhat retro style, her outfit iron-pressed and accented by little round pearl buttons. She hardly looked like the severe, middle-aged woman that Rin had been expecting, but it wasn't unpleasant to be proven wrong. Instead it was rather fascinating, and Rin couldn't stop stealing looks whenever she thought the woman wasn't looking.

Sesshoumaru had allowed them to move a desk to the library for the duration of their studying. Rin supposed it made sense to pursue scholarly goals whilst surrounded by full and ancient-smelling bookshelves that towered to the ceiling on all sides. As she sat down, she tried to smile as charmingly as possible, hoping that she and Aya could become fast friends. However, Aya hardly took the time to share names before setting Rin to task, quizzing her in every subject for several hours. When it was finally finished, Rin was pleased to hear that she was caught up, and even a bit ahead, of her grade level on the science and history components, though not surprised to find that her knowledge of Japanese was lower than average. Her tutor promptly drafted a lesson plan, explaining how often they would meet (only three times a week) and what sort of assignments would be due in-between.

"So do you have any questions?" asked Aya as they finished.

"Umm, about the homework… I don't think it will take more than an hour or two a day to finish."

"Mmhmm?"

"Isn't that… bad? I mean, aren't I going to be doing a lot of drills?"

"But what would you learn from lessons like _that?" _Aya mused. "I know, I know, it's the Japanese teaching method to have problem sets and repetition, and that's it. Well, it's stupid. Anyone can teach you how to memorize, but it takes _teaching _for someone to _learn_."

"But don't all teachers teach?"

"Yes, but most of the time it's not the the kind of teaching that helps you learn. Lectures don't teach you how to think for yourself."

"Oh." Rin puzzled over this. "So you're saying that people should be taught to think for themselves."

"I'm just saying that I've tutored a lot of people who've been taught _not _to look like you're the sort of girl with critical thinking skills already. And I'd know."

Rin peered at Aya, a suspicion forming in her head. She observed the girl's face, from the dark brown of her hair to the shape of her eyes. Sure enough, there were green specks in the soft brown of her irises. "Hatsuzawa-san," she observed, "'You're not Japanese, are you?"

"Yep, you got me," said Aya. She pulled out a notebook from her satchel, and began flipping pages as she explained, with an incidental air, "I'm half-British. Grew up in the U.K. and only moved in with my mom and my step-dad when I started college here in Tokyo."

"You must speak really good English."

"_Of course_," she said in a thick accent, then laughed as she wrote down an indecipherable note on an empty page. "I'm probably just as good as your uncle."

"Who? What?" Rin asked.

"You know, _Sesshoumaru-san_. Isn't he supposed to have been born in England?"

"I never asked," said Rin, mystified.

.

That night, Rin wrapped on her warmest scarf and made the quick journey to Mori Tower. Sesshoumaru had had a meeting with one of his clients through dinner, and it had run on so long that he'd ultimately told Jaken to have Rin meet him just a few floors above his office. Rin would have preferred a long walk through the mazes of the Roppongi Hills complex's acreage, especially as she saw more of the sky than the ground from the windows in the penthouse, but the variation in her routine was more than welcome.

Sesshoumaru was waiting for her on the top of the tower when she arrived. She could recognize him from behind, though she could hardly say what it was that distinguished him from the other visitors to the dimly-lit courtyard. She supposed that they had grown familiar with each other at last.

"How was your first lesson?" he asked her as she sidled up to him.

"Good. My tutor's very nice. I like her."

"She did a good job?"

"I think so. She wasn't teaching me today, just asking about what I've already learned. But she seemed better than my teachers at school, I guess, because she was really listening to me. Why?"

Rin could not see anything on his face, but could hear a slight hesitancy before he spoke. "I had some …concerns. Hatsuzawa-san is not fully accredited."

"Because she isn't graduated, right?" Rin surmised. It was strange, now that she thought of it, considering how Sesshoumaru seemed capable of buying… well, anything. She could probably be tutored by professors if he wished it. "In that case, why would you have chosen her as my tutor? What other qualifications did she have?" she asked.

Sesshoumaru hesitated for a moment before speaking. "Her family is not unknown to me."

Rin couldn't help grinning to herself. Her long-held suspicions were confirmed. She'd thought from the beginning, that Aya Hatsuzawa had to be very affluent or else she could not act so poised, or dress so nicely. She had behaved so differently from anyone that _Rika_ had ever met in the Buraku, or even in her school. She certainly behaved differently from _Rin._

"So you thought it was safer that someone you knew, rather than a total outsider, came in to the apartment to give me lessons," Rin sussed out. She nodded to herself. "Actually, it makes sense when you put it that way, doesn't it? Of course, I could have just gone to a _juku*_…"

"That would have been unacceptable."

"Why?" Rin was earnestly curious.

"A personal tutor provides a much better service," he said, and his tone banked no questions, though Rin still had many left.

"Well, it would be nice to get out more."

Sesshoumaru did not answer, but continued to stare out into the skyline. Seeing that her comment had lead nowhere, Rin simply rested her head on her arms and took in her surroundings. She could hear the chatter of people around her, of couples and businessmen with their clients observing the city scene. Yet in spite of the many places and people in whom she could have focused her attention, she found herself returning to Sesshoumaru, pulled by an inexplicable draw. It occurred to her that she found him fascinating. For all of the distance he put between himself and others, and more than abundant severity, he had a heart hiding inside of him. She was more than certain that his brevity about her schooling had not been from a lack of caring but because he had already made his decision after careful planning. What evidence she had for this opinion, she could not say, but she would believe it until proven otherwise.

"Do you like the view, Rin?"

Sesshoumaru's voice interrupted her musings.

"It's all right," she allowed. "If I were to say I liked anything about it, it would be the blinking red lights at the top of buildings. Do you know what I mean?"

"No. How is it different from the yellow-white lights coming from windows?"

"I don't know. It's just, the red lights makes me feel protected, somehow. Like there is someone out there I can't always see, watching over me."

"There is now," said Sesshoumaru simply.

Rin smiled.

It was true. She _did _have a family, even if it didn't take the shape of the ones she was used to seeing on T.V. or hearing about in books. While Jaken seemed like one of those kind but outrageous grandfathers she had always seen but never had for her own, Sesshoumaru did not fit with any image that she had of a father, even in her very limited experience of them. He did not kiss her good night, inquire about her day, or regale her with stories of his own. He simply inquired after her, observed her, and seemed to seek out her presence for their walks. Sometimes, when it grew late in the evening, he would retire to the room she was in, reading old scrolls from his library or newspapers about the financial market. Other mornings he would stay late just to make sure she had been properly fed. She liked him, yet at the same time she didn't really know what to think of him. He seemed almost like a friend, but more distant. He was close to her, and yet something stood between them like a fence around a cage; like a secret guarding a secret.

She looked at Sesshoumaru. He was still facing the city, watching her from the corner of his eye, and for a moment the reflection caught in them and his eyes were overlaid with red. Rin smiled at the strange thought it left her with, that Sesshoumaru was one of those blinking red lights on top of a building, out of reach but always watching over her in the midst of so much darkness.

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**_March 13, 2006  
><em>**_Sesshoumaru_

Sesshoumaru had caught her scent outside the doorway to his room each morning for several mornings now.

This morning, too, she was waiting for him, listening at his door. It was clearly a pattern now. He did not know how she had discovered that there was anything unusual about his morning routine, but guessed Jaken was responsible.

Thinking that turnabout was fair play, he silently approached the door, and without warning, sharply tugged it open.

_"Oof!"_ Rin exclaimed, stumbling forward and clutching onto the door frame to keep herself upright.

Sesshoumaru could barely hide his amusement. She had been listening in with all of her might, and standing so close to the door that, had it been the sort of door that opened outwards, she would have had quite an injury to her head.

"Good morning, Rin."

She noticed his mood, and gave him an endearing scowl. "You're laughing at me."

Of course she was right; he could feel the close-lipped smile on his face. It wasn't as tight as it had been the first time he'd revealed it to her earlier in the month. The muscles in his cheeks were almost beginning to feel loose and pliant.

Collecting himself, he gestured to the interior of his room. "Come inside, since you are so curious," he offered. Rin stifled a gasp at his suggestion, but did not argue as he had expected she would. She stepped forward and allowed him to close the door behind himself.

She looked around with wide, searching eyes. The room was decorated much like her own, Sesshoumaru knew, with sparse but stylish furniture and a color palette of dark woods, light grays, cream carpet and black accent work - and no personal decorations, discounting the reading at his bedside table. There was something, however, that immediately drew Rin's interest, and she approached the burning sticks of incense in the center of the room, peering into the smoke.

"What's this for? Are you doing Buddhist prayers?"

"No. This incense is just used for meditation," Sesshoumaru answered her.

"Oh," said Rin, taking in a deep breath from her nostrils. "So… it's to help you relax."

"You might say that."

"It smells nice." A smile passed over her face, so airy that it seemed to have been brought on by the perfume. "I've never actually meditated before. Is it hard to do?"

Sesshoumaru gestured to the ground. "You may join me and decide for yourself."

He seated himself in front of the incense sticks, and adopted his pose with ease, settling his weight on his calves and feet, and placing his hands on his thighs. Predictably, Rin stepped up to the challenge - or the invitation, as it was - and affected a serious expression as she attempted to copy him, contorting her body as she sat on the floor.

"Now what?" she asked once she had finally stilled herself. "I'm doing it right, aren't I?"

Sesshoumaru nodded. "Close your eyes and focus only on your breathing. Let it slow and calm you."

He didn't take his own advice, however. Keeping his eyes open instead, he watched Rin as she adjusted her legs, taking the weight off of them at the expense of her posture and form. "I don't know how you can feel peaceful when it hurts so much," she muttered peevishly.

Sesshoumaru could not help but raise an eyebrow. Opening her eyes, Rin caught it and bit back a laugh. "I was joking," she assuaged him.

"Hmm."

Sesshoumaru now shut his eyes, and began to slow his breathing.

A full minute did not pass before Rin chirpily broke the silence.

"I actually felt a bit calmer after that last bit, you know!" she exclaimed. "I think this whole concept is-"

"Do you not understand the term 'silent meditation,' Rin?"

Chastened, Rin became quiet again. That is to say that she became as quiet as she was capable of being. As a human, she was less aware of the rustling of fabric when she shifted on her legs, or the sound that came when she blew the air out particularly hard from her nostrils. But Sesshoumaru took the moment to renew the clearing of his mind, to breathe the essence of his life out of himself with the very air, and to reabsorb it in the following moment, to let it recenter himself as he sat on the slick wooden floor of the room. He shucked back the bonds of his aggressive youkai instincts, his desire to succeed, even his ability to sense the world around him, for a moment of lightness.

And then he could hear the flutter of her eyelashes. She was peeking at him with only her left eye; the other still tightly shut. Though annoyance was already very far away, he knew he could not maintain his concentration any longer.

"Do you know why I meditate, Rin?" he asked her.

"To find inner peace?" she guessed. "...You want to ascend to nirvana?"

"I do it to remain sane."

She snorted. Sesshoumaru noticed but did not care, still encompassed by his placid feeling.

"It is harder than you would imagine to stay sane, living in the world as it is today."

"I don't see why."

"Indeed." He opened his eyes, letting them drift to the light peeking from his windows facing out over the cityscape. True, his curtains remained drawn and there was nothing to be seen, so as far as humans would be concerned. But he was not human, and this allowed to him to sense _more:_ the whorl of activity, the frenzy of people already overwhelming the streets at the opening of the morning. Many of them were already entering buildings stuffed with people who would not exit again until the light left the city once more. There were crumpled newspapers tumbling into gutters along with the ashes of old abandoned cigarettes. Heels clacking against sidewalks. Cars that skidded on curves and bumped around on uneven pavement, and he was aware of all of the noise, the chaos, the calamity of the human lives and their trappings, at _once_.

"For some of us, the over-abundance of life is most evident in the dearth of it," he told Rin. "Being too aware can lead to too little meaningful awareness, or even the extinguishing of it."

"Sesshoumaru-san, I don't really see what you're getting at."

"Then perhaps it's worth meditating over."

"Perhaps…" she admitted reluctantly, and went silent again. But she clearly could not focus, and Sesshoumaru felt even his own sense of calm settling down into his stomach, and his presence of mind returning to its normal state.

He took a moment to drink in Rin's form before breaking her from her attempted meditation.

"It's time for breakfast," he said evenly. He might as well have shouted, though, with the way her eyes snapped open to alertness. She didn't appear the least bit dazed from a trance, or even from sleepiness. Rather, she might have just been lost in a daydream, Sesshoumaru reflected.

"I'm starving," said Rin as she got to her feet. "It's exhausting to do mental exercise like that while still hungry."

"It would be good for you to learn discipline," Sesshoumaru said to her as he put out the incense. "Perhaps you should develop that skill."

Rin picked herself up off the ground and dusted off her knees from invisible lint. "Do you mean that I should take up meditating? …Lessons in how to be a good Buddhist?"

Hearing the note of distaste in her voice, Sesshoumaru suggested, "Not exactly. It doesn't have to be meditation; a refined art would suffice. I imagine there is a benefit in anything from calligraphy, to flower arrangement, to paper folding."

He pointedly did not mention martial arts, but Rin didn't appear to care. She had a thoughtful expression as she passed through his doorway.

"Well, I have always wanted to learn to arrange flowers," she said. "I love flowers so much; I think I always have. And I'd love to go out and have lessons about something so beautiful."

Sesshoumaru was pleased that her admission didn't surprise him in the least. He followed Rin into the hallway, just remembering to close the door to the bedroom behind him, trapping the smoky smell of peace inside.

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*_juku -_ cram school


	6. Chapter 6

Thanks goes again to my beta readers, **Liza** **P**. and **Amku**, who did a very good job whipping this chapter into shape, and to my reviewers who encouraged me to keep going. It's been a bit rough this past month, so I'm sorry for the slow update. Hopefully the plot thickening in this update will make up for it a bit!

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**Bird on a wire**

_six_

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_March 16, 2006**  
>Jaken<strong>_

He knew that she was coming long before she'd arrived at the door. Her rapid footfalls were as loud as river stones skipping across a placid stream, and they were fast as ones she would've made had she been chased by a horde of demons. As there hadn't been enough demons left in all of Honshu to form a horde in over a hundred and fifty years, Jaken didn't think anything of it. Resultantly, he found himself unprepared for Rin's mood when she finally appeared before him.

When he looked up from his book (an old treatise on the Satsuma clan of the cold rice fields of Tohoku), he saw that her face was flushed and her eyebrows were slightly knotted. It was the same face she used to make when she was upset. The first time he'd seen it on her childish face, he'd merely thought that it meant she was hungry; and because she'd barely even spoken back in those days, he'd gone by his instincts and tossed a mandarin orange at her without caring much for aim. He hadn't made much effort in restraining his own power, either, so when the fruit missed its target and clocked her in the chest, she stumbled backward and fell in a heap over the loosened _geta_ strap that she had been grumbling to herself about in the first place.

"What do you want?" Jaken asked, unsure whether he should speak at all.

"There's a woman in the hallway…She says that she's here for my lessons."

Jaken carefully wedged a bookmark between the pages of his old tome and swiveled around in the sumptuous leather chair. He tapped his wrinkled fingers on the burnished burgundy arm of the recliner, his fingertips dancing at the edge of the cushion encrusted with pewter bullets.

"Odagawa-sensei has arrived already? I wouldn't have expected her to come early. Well, I suppose she has to make the appropriate preparations…"

"_Jaken-san."_

"What?" Jaken snapped back, "Did you forget that Sesshoumaru-sama arranged for you to have lessons in flower arrangement?"

"Of course I remembered. I just thought that I'd be having them at a school."

"This is more convenient."

Rin crossed her arms. "Really? How? All the supplies alone would take more time, more money… I mean, just to transport the flowers, the vases, the tools… That's not the point, anyway; Jaken-san, I said I wanted to take the lessons, and I did, but I didn't want to take them _here_. I wanted to go-"

"Sesshoumaru-sama arranged that-"

"-to a school. Somewhere further than five minutes away, preferably."

"_'Preferably'?_" Jaken spluttered. The audacity of the girl compelled him to rise from his seat, and he shook with barely contained ire, his sense of justice flaring. Who was she, an orphan, a human, an object that had been purchased, to speak of what she wanted?

"What makes you think that Sesshoumaru-sama cares about your preference in this matter?" he fired at her. "What gives you the right?"

Rin, taken aback, stared at him with her mouth agape. By the time she'd found the presence of mind to attempt speech, Jaken cut her off. "You will provoke our master's wrath if you continue this, Rin. Submit or suffer the consequences."

It was an empty threat if there ever was one. Jaken was no fool - he knew that any indiscretion on Rin's part would be taken out on him. But Rin was young. She still didn't seem to understand consequences unless they were taking place directly before her eyes.

"Fine," she bit out. Then, without another word, she stalked out of the room.

With the door to the hallway shut, the air grew stuffy around Jaken very quickly. It took him a while to regain his senses well enough to find his seat once more. He felt lost to a haze muddled with confusion, in which he could find little sense with which to comprehend his master's ward. Rin had never had a problem with Sesshoumaru's decisions before, and had always accepted them with unquestioning trust and acquiescence. The only time he had ever seen her upset was when she had been forced to leave them, or when their triumvirate had been threatened.

Not being able to understand the root of Rin's new self-centeredness was just as irritating as witnessing the behavior itself. Deciding that he would not dwell on it any longer, Jaken closed his eyes, and remembered the girl as he had understood her. He could see in the back of his mind an image of her sitting in the living room of their apartment in the sky, her hair pulled up with a satin scrunchy. She was eating the mandarin orange that he had hit her with, the juice dripping all over her hand, as she laughed before an empty vase and a pile of precisely-cut flowers - flowers that his lord would wear tucked into the folds of his belt and even in a crown on his head if the girl insisted on it. Sesshoumaru always gave in, even to her most trivial requests.

Jaken had only ever asked Sesshoumaru for one thing that mattered, to be saved, and it had served him well. The gift of being allowed to serve at his lord's side was so magnificent; it was the one thing he had never regretted, not even for a moment. Until the end of his life, _he_ would always serve his lord.

.

_**Rin**_

"I like this arrangement," Aya commented. She slid one of her fingers over the deep green leaf-lip of an iris. The pale blue flower bobbed its head once at the half-Japanese woman, breaking momentarily from its form.

Rin humphed, not looking up from her work. "...Glad _you _do."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Rin didn't answer, instead shifting in her seat and adjusting the position of her arm over her notebook as she wrote.

"Rin?"

She ignored her tutor, concentrating on the difficult problem set in front of her instead. It wasn't so difficult that it should've made her as annoyed as it did, necessitating that she engrave each stroke of her pencil deeply into her paper just to form the letters and numbers of an equation. She barely even thought of the problem itself as she worked; instead her mind kept going back to the irises in the vase between them, and the cloying scent that wafted past her defenses even when she tried to block it out.

The sound of an abruptly shutting textbook startled Rin, causing her to look up from her work. She watched in confusion as Aya slid her teacher's manual and textbook into her luggage and began to methodically put away her teaching supplies, one by one.

Rin glanced at the clock. "What are you doing?"

"I'm putting my things away."

"I thought we finished at 2 o'clock."

"Yes," Aya agreed, her voice taut. "However, I think we're finished for today."

"…But why?"

"Because you're obviously not in a mood for working, and I won't put both of us through that," she answered, fixing her student with a considerably softer look. "Did something happen? This behavior isn't like you."

"I…." Rin put her head down on her desk. It was cool to the touch but also hard and unrelenting, bringing her little comfort. It fit her mood perfectly.

"It's nothing," she muttered into the wood. Her breath spread out in a tiny cloud on the surface of the table, and disappeared soon after she spoke.

"Rin." Aya's voice cut into her little world. "Sit up and stop this. You're not a _child_. Even if you were, it wouldn't give you the right to act petulant. When adults have bad days, we don't take it out on others - or at least the mature adults don't. We find more productive ways to deal with our problems instead."

Rin lifted her head begrudgingly.

"What I'm getting at is, if something's wrong you can just tell me," Aya said evenly. "I don't tattle."

"What, are you saying that you want to be my therapist?" Rin grumbled, but her teacher just laughed.

"I get paid by the hour anyway, so why not?" she replied.

Rin turned away, but she considered her tutor's words. If she was honest with herself, she really _did _want someone to talk to, and the desire to accept Aya's offer really did burn inside her chest. It was true that Sesshoumaru had made the same request to her, that she talk with him, and she took pleasure in indulging him with everything she could think of saying when they walked together in the evenings. But there were certain things she could not trust him with; certain problems that she was sure he wouldn't understand. There were things she was tired of keeping to herself.

She looked at Aya from the corner of her eye. The fair-haired woman sitting back in her chair was older than Rin, but not too much older. Maybe that extra decade of experience would count for something, if Rin dared trust her.

Did she even have a choice?

"Have you just-" Rin's voice escaped her before she'd thought her sentence through, and she quickly interrupted herself to reapproach the subject. "Do you know the story of Rapunzel? The Disney princess who gets locked up in a tower?"

"I'm pretty sure it was a German fairy tale first, but yes, I know it. Why do you ask?"

Rin felt a few strands of her hair drift over her forehead and into her mouth. She spit them out, miserable. "Today I just _feel _like that," she said.

"Stuffy? Closed up? You probably just need some exercise."

"I go on walks and stuff…"

"That's probably not enough, at your age. I'd suggest something a little hardier, like running or weight-lifting, though you don't really strike me as the _sporty _type." Aya stuck her hands into the pockets of her long cardigan, breathing out slowly. "…Why don't you just arrange to go out and see some friends? When I was visiting Tokyo in the summers during high school, I used to go out with my mates to Harajuku all the time."

"Rin doesn't…" she caught the slip quickly. "I don't have any friends."

Aya, had she noticed anything strange in the statement, didn't make a comment. She seemed to have found the cover story that Sesshoumaru had provided for Rin to be sufficient reason in itself for Rin to be lonely. "Yeah, I'd forgotten that you just moved here," she afforded. "And it's hard to make new friends at your age. And the fact that you're getting tutored instead of attending a school probably doesn't help much. But who says you need to have friends to go out and have a good time? Just grab a taxi and _go _somewhere. If nothing else, you'll meet people."

"I don't have any money."

"Train fare isn't that expensive, last I checked. A couple hundred yen each way..."

"I don't have _any_ money," Rin reiterated.

This at last brought Aya to a halt. "None at all?"

"No."

Aya stared at Rin with an expression of such vivid disbelief that Rin wondered if she shouldn't have spoken; if she had said something more horrible than she had even realized; as if she had violated some trust she had between herself and Sesshoumaru. A feeling of guilt started to churn out her anger as she raced to take back her words.

"It's not like I'm not provided for," Rin allowed. "If I ever need anything, I can just ask Jaken, or I can use Sesshoumaru's name- he has an account you know, that they let me use here at the Hills complex, and he never set a limit-"

Aya cut Rin off with a sharp wave of her hand. "No. I don't want to hear anymore!" she said. "That's just… Just crazy, Rin, no excuse. No money at all… how are you supposed to learn independence without an allowance? Or at least without getting handouts sometimes? I mean, it's not like you'll need to learn to manage your money with your uncle being who he is and all, obviously. But it's just not right, you know? I mean, what if you just wanted a soda while you were out on the street?"

Rin was silent. Rika had never had the money for a random soda when she'd lived in the Buraku, so she'd never even thought about it. But she wasn't Rika anymore; she was Rin_,_ and maybe Rin deserved more.

As soon as she'd thought this though, though, Jaken's words came back to her full force. _How dare you… How dare you… _the echoes of his words ricocheted off the sides of her skull, trapping her in.

"You should tell your parents that your uncle isn't giving you an allowance," Aya decided on the spot. "They won't be happy, I bet. They might even want you to go back to stay with them again."

"That sounds kind of extreme," Rin murmured. Aya shook her head vigorously, and the curled ends of her hair bobbed around her cheeks.

"No, I don't think it would be. Sesshoumaru-san told me all about your background, about your family's financial problems and how they want you to stay here to get a leg up. But in spite of all that, I'm surprised that your family trusts him as much as they do."

Rin's heart rate accelerated. "Wait, what's that supposed to mean?" she managed, her curiosity, and as well as a sense of inexplicable dread, overriding their earlier topic of conversation entirely.

"Just that… Well, that there have been rumors, is all."

"Rumors about what?"

Aya gave Rin a long, considering look, then shook her head. "You should ask your mother or father," she evaded.

"I can't," Rin said honestly, "So I'm asking you."

Apparently regretting her words, Rin's teacher gave out a long sigh before finally explaining herself. "There have been rumors about your uncle, Rin, in certain circles, but never anything substantial. I mean, if the gossip were true then that would be one thing, but if your family didn't tell you about any of it, then it's probably all groundless. And it's none of my business, as a matter of fact," she said. "I'm sorry I even said anything. Let's pretend I didn't. Anyway-"

"But you _did _say something," Rin pointed out. She shifted in her chair, leaning towards her teacher. The curiosity, the inexplicable flicker of worry - and confusion, had a tight grip on her now. "Why did you say that Sesshoumaru-san might not be trustworthy?"

"It's… complicated." Aya's gaze made Rin certain that she was being evaluated, though she couldn't guess what for. She was grateful when at last, Aya pulled her chair closer to the desk and leaned in close to speak with her, she had obviously made up her mind in Rin's favor.

"Don't let him know that I told you this," Aya said, her voice low. "I don't think I'd lose my job over it, but… why make your employer upset, you know?"

"Yeah," Rin nodded eagerly. Her voice dropped as well. She felt something strange inside of her, as if she were committing a minor sin, like stealing a hundred yen coin from her mother's purse to purchase a treat at the convenience store. Jaken's words still taunted her as well. She was being bad when she should instead be grateful and let things lie as they were. But the desire to know more about Sesshoumaru overpowered both of those conflicting emotions. Aya was offering her a glimpse of something she otherwise might never see. She could only listen. It was all she could do.

"You said you didn't know that Sesshoumaru-san had lived in England."

"I did…"

"Well, don't you think that's strange, seeing as you're his family?" Rin couldn't really comment on this, but Aya continued, "Well, no one really seemed to know where he was for the first half of his life. He just appeared in Tokyo 20 years ago or so, after his father died, to take over the company in his father's place, with a bunch of educational certificates but no work background and no references, either. He looks like the spitting image of the old Inutaisho, too, even though your uncle claims to be half-Japanese. Granted, he looks exotic, but not in the way _I _do, for example. Plus… He says he was raised in England, and his English is good, but… the thing is… his accent doesn't _fit _anywhere."

"I don't follow you…"

"In the English language - or at least as its spoken in England; I have no idea how the Americans do it, for example - our accents can be traced back to the neighborhood where we grew up, or the people we spent a lot of time with. There are literally hundreds of discernible accents in my home country. So if someone doesn't have a consistent accent, we assume he is either pretending to be from somewhere else or he moved a lot in his youth and very likely didn't have parents with the same accent."

Rin still didn't really understand. Collecting herself, she tried suggesting, "Sesshoumaru-san must have learned Japanese since he was young, right? That's why he's a native Japanese speaker. I'd have never known he lived abroad. Maybe that's why he has a strange accent in English, rather than the other way around, or something."

"I was raised abroad, too, Rin. That's how I know when something's just… off. Sesshoumaru-san speaks like a native Englishman, when he needs to, but he doesn't act like one, in spite of growing up in that country. He acts more Japanese than my grandfather, if you know what I mean. He's always so cold and formal_._"

"He is older than you," Rin countered.

"By what, ten years?"

"Okay, so it's not that much. But what are you even accusing Sesshoumaru-san of, anyway? I mean, if there's no point, it's not really fair… Just because he's different from you…"

Aya leaned back in her chair. "See," she said, huffily, "This is why I didn't want to say anything. You're so loyal to him..."

"Of course I am. He's my family," Rin protested.

"Or maybe that's just what he wants you to think."

Rin flinched at the words. She couldn't help it - for a split second, she was irrationally afraid that Aya had stumbled upon the truth, about how she'd been adopted out of the Buraku, and that she wasn't related to Sesshoumaru by blood at all. However, Rin soon found herself troubled for a more appropriate reason. What Aya was saying seemed to have no relation to _Rin's _heritage, but to her adopted guardian's.

"What do you mean, Aya?"

"I… Well, a number of people… think Sesshoumaru-san has always lived in Japan, and that his English background is just a cover. But who knows _why _he had to stay here until he was old enough to take over the company from his father…? You're from his mother's side, so you've probably heard nothing of it, Rin, but I think there's no question to be argued about the matter. The Inutaisho family is hiding a secret. I couldn't say what it is, but it's got to be something big. And it probably has to do with their financial success and extraordinary wealth."

"What kind of a secret could cause success and have to do with keeping someone from leaving the country? One that isn't illegal or anything."

"I can't think of one, unless Sesshoumaru-san is a victim, too. Perhaps he was being groomed from birth, put to work, kept out of school, and forced into this path against his will…"

"I don't think that's it," said Rin, bemused by the mental picture of her 'uncle' as a boy her age, being dragged around like a dog on a leash. "He wouldn't put up with that from anyone. Even if he were my age, I don't think… anyone would try to inflict it on him, either."

"Then it could be something else. Maybe he came from another family, or had a secret twin; who knows?"

Rin shrugged. "Even if there is a secret, it's not hurting anyone. Why does it matter?"

"Because maybe it _is _hurting someone. How do you know that it's not what's keeping you inside this apartment?"

Rin couldn't answer. She wasn't sure what she could say, because Aya had a good point. It reminded her of how unhappy she'd been just a few minutes ago, when she had nothing to think about except her own sense of entrapment. With those feelings rising up again, Rin felt like she could do nothing _but_ listen to the strange judgment.

"Anyway, Rin, if your uncle is making rules that you don't like, you don't have to just sit back and accept it. You're in an adult world now. If you want to be treated like one then you'll have to use adult strategies to get what you want. Do you know what I'm getting at?"

"You think I should find out what this 'secret' is," Rin surmised.

"I do. And I think you should use that knowledge to convince him to treat you more fairly, unless the secret's really dirty, in which case you should obviously take it to the police."

"I can't imagine…" Rin trailed off. She couldn't quite picture Sesshoumaru being involved in something disgusting enough that it would warrant her running away. As much as she _did _want to get out of the apartment more often, for her own sake, she didn't like the idea of betraying her guardian - a man who had only ever been good to her, even if he was sometimes over-protective.

"I'm sorry, Rin. I didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I just thought, well, it couldn't hurt for you to find out more about your family history," Aya said. "And on the way you might find out what happened to your great-aunt after the war. I've never even seen a picture of her."

"Neither have I," said Rin dryly. "You seem to know a lot about my family history, Aya-sensei."

"Not really. I just have a keen ability to remember random facts. I suppose I should've been a historian rather than a teacher," said Aya, shrugging. She might have colored, but it was hard to tell in the lighting of the room. Rin ignored it. She had other, more pressing things to think about anyway, and nothing else seemed important in light of those revelations. It was probably for the best that their lesson had ended early after all.

.

Dinner was awkward.

The uncomfortable atmosphere reminded Rin of their first few days together, when she hadn't really known what to say to anyone, and neither of her companions had volunteered to help. She'd never been particularly good at making friends who were older than her, anyway. It was only once she'd made the effort to find common ground with Sesshoumaru or Jaken that she realized that there was plenty they could talk about, after all, and that mutual silence could be agreeable - at least sometimes_._

Now, she only had two things she could think of saying, and neither topic was any more agreeable than the other.

It hardly came as a surprise that Jaken did his best to fill the table conversation in her silence. He clamored over every topic he could think of in a series of monologues, designed obviously to gain his master's approval, though Sesshoumaru appeared not to notice. Rin could distinctly feel that he was watching her, even though she couldn't catch him at it. It was as if she could sense him thinking of her; or, of course, that she was just going a bit crazy.

By the dessert course, Jaken had finally had enough. He pointed his grapefruit spoon at her and, nearly flinging a bit of the fruit at her, he demanded, "Well? Don't you have something to share?"

"No," she answered, making the word sound as distasteful as possible. She took a quick bite of dessert to cover it as Jaken sputtered in disapproval.

Sesshoumaru finally entered the conversation, though he did it as wordlessly as usual. As he turned to her, Rin could feel his gaze pass from her to the arrangement of flowers that had been moved to one of the low coffee tables across from them in the extended living room.

"They're from my first flower arrangement lesson today," she found herself saying. "I'm not very good."

"Jaken mentioned that you were dissatisfied with the lesson."

Rin stared at the pear and grapefruit in her bowl as if they could reach out and rescue her. The feelings of loneliness and guilt that had arisen from Jaken's earlier chastisements clashed within her. _What would Sesshoumaru say if he knew?_ she wondered. Am I really so ungrateful? Am I in _the wrong?_

"Do you want another?" Sesshoumaru asked when she didn't immediately respond.

"I…" she hesitated, and thought of Aya.

"You do not have to continue if you do not wish to."

"I want to," Rin found herself saying, and after a thoughtful pause, her guardian nodded, apparently content with the reply. As he began to lift his fork to his mouth, however, Rin felt a strong wave of a feeling that was everything _but _contentedness, and just as wordless. She knew that she couldn't let things lay as they were. Her heart already felt that it couldn't bear keeping this inside of her in addition to everything else.

She dredged up her courage. "Sesshoumaru-san," she said. "My teacher, Aya, is only half-Japanese, isn't she?"

"Yes."

"She told me that you were, too."

Rin had barely spoken the words when Jaken's fork clattered to the floor. Turning red, he ducked under the table and began fishing for the utensil. It seemed that he was using the extra time as much to regain his dignity as to regain his lost fork.

"I have spent some time in England, though I was hardly born there," said Sesshoumaru, his voice somewhat distanced. Jaken bumped his head on the ceiling of the table, earning a disapproving, and in Rin's experience, a rare, frown.

"I saw a photo album on the table at the Higurashi shrine…" she began. "It was of your brother's wedding."

"I find that hard to believe."

"Really? Well, now that I think of it, Higurashi-boushi's friend _did _say it was actually taken at a festival. But it was obviously the Higurashi shrine, and the man in that picture looked so much like you, he must've been your brother…"

Sesshoumaru shook his head once, as if it dismiss her, but after a few moments of sitting under Rin's imploring stare he finally was moved to answer her, albeit evasively.

"You visited the shrine over a month ago," he said at last. "Is there a reason that you are bringing this up now?"

"Yes. I want to know what your - no, our family - is like," said Rin. "I want to know why you wouldn't go to your brother's wedding but you'll talk to his in-laws now."

"Circumstances have changed," answered Sesshoumaru cryptically.

"What were the old circumstances, then? Why weren't you there?"

"In the picture or at the wedding?"

"Either. You didn't go, did you?"

"No," Sesshoumaru reluctantly agreed. "I did not attend the ceremony."

"Why not?"

Rin could tell that Sesshoumaru was becoming uncomfortable, even though he didn't really show it by anything on his face. It was just the subtle clenching in his arm, the stillness that he affected as he sat upright in his chair. She knew she was on the right track, even if she didn't know what it was.

Obviously, so did Sesshoumaru, as he avoided answering her even after staying silent for nearly a minute.

"I was not invited," he gave in at last, his voice betraying none of his emotions. "Nor would I have attended had I been given an invitation. My own brother was only '_half_''*, as you would say. We did not share the same mother, and although my father… supported him, he was not an official part of our family. My relationship with him was strained from start to finish."

Rin couldn't help feeling a pang in her heart. Part of it was for Sesshoumaru, but even more so it was for the strange-looking young man in the photograph. Maybe he'd only gotten that way, rebellious enough to grow out and dye his hair and everything, because he had been neglected? Maybe he had just wanted attention or wanted to be liked by his friends? Of course, his form of neglect wasn't really like the kind she'd seen in the Buraku, where the poverty stemmed out from money and branched into the heart from there. She could not imagine having money and not having love.

"Why did it have to be like that, Sesshoumaru-san?" Rin found herself asking. "Wouldn't life have been so lonely for him?"

As she spoke, Jaken finally emerged from beneath the end of table with an empty sake cup over his thumb. The edge of the tablecloth trailed over his forehead, but his eyes were huge, almost yellow and bulbous as they blinked up into the light. "You don't _get _it, girl,_" _he crowed as he staggered to his feet. His woozy voice rose with him, from a mutter to a yell. "Inuyasha was just lucky to be alive. In fact, Inuyasha should've been killed when he was born! But instead my master saved his life, time and time again! And _he _was just a _han_-"

"_Jaken_!"

Sesshoumaru's voice shot through the room like a whip, and both Jaken and Rin froze in the wake of it. The energy in the room, which had already felt chilly and tense, could not compare to the raw, freezing power that gripped the air around her guardian. He had gotten to his feet - it seemed as if he'd grown at least half a foot - and as he towered over them both, Rin couldn't help but feel her heart cower in fear. Her guardian's distant, aloof kindness was gone. Everything was absent from his facial expression, except for anger so sharp and unexpected that the image of it was burnt behind her retinas even when she blinked her eyes.

Rin had no idea what she was witnessing. But now she knew one thing for certain. Aya had been right. The Inutaisho family had a secret; a big one, a _terrible _one, and they didn't want her to know what it was.

.

*_half_ - mixed Japanese ethnicityBR


	7. Chapter 7

It has been so long since the last update. I'm so sorry! But thanks goes to my beta reader, Liza P who (as usual) went above and beyond the call of duty. I hope you have a good time with this chapter! The next one is almost finished. :)

.

**Bird on a Wire**

_._

_seven_

.

_**March 21, 2006**  
>Rin<em>

"The desire to trust someone isn't the same as trusting them," said Aya, thumbing the edge of her book thoughtfully. "So which is it, really?"

"Can't it just be both?"

"No," said Aya. Rin slunk down in her seat in a pique of chagrin. Her teacher had only arrived five or so minutes ago, but already she found herself sinking in a quagmire of internal debate that tore her between two conflicting but equally compelling desires: one, to disappear in her chair as if it could hide her, and two,to run out of the library altogether.

"Well," said Rin finally, "I _do _trust Sesshoumaru-san."

"Even after that outburst you told me about?" Aya raised her eyebrow, and Rin flushed.

"Yes," she admitted uncomfortably, "even though last night frightened me. I don't know what Jaken was talking about, or why Sesshoumaru won't tell me more about his brother, but ever since I first came here, Sesshoumaru-san has been really good to me. He's one of the only people who has."

"I'm not saying he hasn't."

"You don't have to. You think he's been lying to me, and you know what? You're probably right. And lying… I don't feel good thinking about him not telling me things… about bad things… So I want to agree with you, but I just can't. I don't want to believe it. I don't want to do what I think I want to do, _or _what I feel like I want to do!"

"The battle of the heart and mind," summarized Aya, cradling her chin on her clasped hands.

"Sorry, what?"

"Heart and mind dualism, you know?**"**

Rin shook her head. "I've never heard of it."

"It's a theory on human nature from ancient Greece**.** A wise man reasoned that people are actually separated in two. That is, we both have opposite and sometimes contradictory elements that make us who we are. The "physical" and the "spiritual." Other people have since taken those ideas further. They started to argue that our rational, logical thoughts exist on a separate plane from our feelings. So that's heart and mind dualism."

"It doesn't

"I agree with you," said Aya, her lip twitching. "I know our society has bought into the idea of dualism… But I don't think it has any merit at all. But you know, there was a lot of human history before, and even after the theory became mainstream, in which other people didn't know about those ideas and did just fine. Think about harmony, Rin. Isn't it important in Japan to harmonize what is already there rather than insisting on keeping it closed off and broken? Just because everyone says that the separation exists doesn't mean it does, or that it should."

Rin felt her head swimming from the impromptu lecture. "Where are you going with this?"

"My point is that I don't find it productive to distinguish where things come from inside of ourselves. Believe what you want, but at the end of the day, I don't think we humans know ourselves as well as we think we do. There is one thing that's certain, however. Whether it's our hearts overcoming our minds or our minds denying our hearts, it's always going to be _us_ that's coming out."

Rin scrunched up her brow, perplexed.

"I don't see what you think I should do, then," she stated.

"Isn't it obvious? I'm telling you to go with your gut. Do the thing that feels most true to _you._"

"But I don't know what's true to me."

"Don't you want to know the truth?"

"Yes. Why wouldn't I?"

"Some people are scared of the truth. Or, at least, the consequences of knowing the truth."

"I'm not."

"In that case, I don't see why you can't do that without breaking your trust in Sesshoumaru-san. Or, for that matter, his trust in you."

The increasing press of the conversation finally caused Rin to turn away. She set her shoulders toward the window, and looked past the balcony at the sky and the lumps of city buildings below and far away. Staring at it, her stomach dropped. It occurred to her, unexpectedly, that perhaps she was seated in a more precarious position than she had realized. Certainly, the location of the penthouse was one dimension contributing to her feeling, but another significant factor seemed to be her position in the penthouse as a part of her guardian's family. She felt at once the sense of expectations of her that never had been vocalized but certainly seemed to exist; she also felt very far away from the rest of the world. She was not sure if she was supposed to feel afraid, as Aya had suggested, that she might be pushed off and suddenly left to plummet to the ground, or if she was simply sick from being up so high. Or perhaps it was something else entirely.

"Rin…" Aya's voice, almost kind but still too professional, too academic to be empathetic, broke her from the convergence of unpleasant thoughts. "Why are you being so quiet?"

"Do you think that the reason Sesshoumaru-san didn't tell me his secret is because he doesn't want me to know? I can't leave my family, so as long as I'm here, what can I do but accept that I'm not going to know everything, or to fight it? And even though I want to find out what Sesshoumaru-san won't tell me, I feel… It makes me feel so trapped, like I'm in a cage. And helpless…"

"Rin, listen to me. You are _never _helpless." After letting that sink in, Aya continued in a more soothing voice, "Why don't you try to use the resources that you have to find the answers you want?"

"I don't have any resources."

"Really? You're an Inutaisho now, and that gives you some 'power,' if you want to frame it that way. Just look around. This house is _yours_. What room are we in?"

"The library."

Aya's eyes flashed. "Exactly."

"But how is that supposed to help me? It's just a bunch of books."

"Old books, yes. And documents, too. Libraries usually have more in them than just obscure novels and travelogues, you know. A library is a receptacle of all sorts of knowledge. It's as good a starting place as any for your project."

"Can't I just use the Internet?" asked Rin, to Aya's amusement.

"Sure, you'll be bound to find general information about the Inutaisho family. But as for something that wouldn't be accessible to anyone else, where would it be but in a place just as hard to reach? Think about it. After all, where else would Sesshoumaru keep ancient writings or budgets, or anything worth saving?"

"A family vault somewhere?" suggested Rin half-heartedly.

"Somewhere close, I would say." Aya pushed back her chair and stood up. She appeared princess-like as she surveyed the room, even as coquettishly as she was dressed. An airy, white blouse was tucked into her candy-cane striped, a-line skirt. Rin didn't see a a single piece of lint on the clothing; much less a stain or an imperfect stitch along the hem or side-seams. She wasn't sure if her professor's opulent clothing made her feel jealous, but she certainly felt inferior. She wasn't smart or as polished as the young woman in front of her, and wondered if she ever would be.

"Have you ever looked through this library before, Rin?"

"What, do you really think that the answer might be in _here_?" Rin looked at the heavy-laden walls with a new, if begrudging, interest. It was the first time for her to do after having realized that the shelves didn't hold any of her favorite serial girl's comics.

"I don't know, but it's certainly worth a shot." Tugging at a curl near her chin, Aya spoke to herself. "Now, it probably wouldn't take very long, if…"

"I'm sorry," Rin interrupted. She could feel her heart beating very fast. "But I was just thinking. Can we do my lesson first?"

"Oh," said Aya, her eyes widening as though she had been startled. She sat back down at the table, taking care to sink into her seat, rubbing down the back of her skirt so that it wouldn't crease. "Of course. I'm sorry, I don't know what I was thinking, really. All that talk must have gotten me distracted."

"It's okay," said Rin, pulling out her math folder from the satchel hanging from the back of her chair. She felt exhausted suddenly, but put on a brave face. "I want to distract myself, too."

After the lesson was finished, Aya left. Rin, however, did not. She piled her textbooks at the edge of the table and cracked open a new notebook, taking satisfaction in the sound of the first crease of the paper when she ran her index finger down the inside of the spine. With a few quick slashes of her pen, she had titled the entry _Research._

Truth be told, Rika had had very little experience with research, and even less with libraries. There had been libraries attached to both her elementary and her junior high school, but she had only gone into them once a year with her class and never gone back. Checking out books and bringing them home hadn't seemed like a good idea when she wasn't sure if something might happen to them. Rin, therefore, didn't know how to start her search.

The library in Sesshoumaru's study wrapped around three walls. Had one wall not been entirely taken up by a window, Rin easily imagined that the entire room would be encased in books. As it was, she had decided to start her search at the bottom shelf of the bookcase closest to the left of the door. Kneeling low, she ran her fingers over the rough-textured spines, obscuring their titles one by one as she looked for something that might lead her in the right direction. So far, it just seemed to be a bunch of early editions of famous books, some of which she'd never heard of, and others which she'd read in school, like _I am a Cat _and _Kokoro. _A bit of dust swirled up as she retracted her hand from the row of classics. Rin sneezed and abandoned the shelf, moving to the next. And then to the next, and to the next…

As the minutes, then hours passed, and a growing mountain of books lost their way from the shelf and into her pile of works to study, Rin grew steadily more tired. It was as if her body's energy was being transferred to her mind, and setting it aflame. There had to be two thousand books piled into the room, and though she hadn't learned anything about her family yet, much less seen its name mentioned, she could feel the knowledge of it surrounding her more than it ever had before. She was sure that she would find a lead somewhere. It was only a matter of time. The Inutaisho's were famous. And surely, nothing exposed to so much light could stay secret forever.

_._

_**March 23, 2006**  
>Jaken<em>

Jaken started suddenly on his armchair, surprised to find that his view of the television was blocked by Rin. She smelled old, like parchment and dust, but was lit on the side by a bright rush of sunlight from the open wall of windows. She was staring directly at him, waiting, it seemed, for an answer.

"What is it?" he harrumphed. "I'm watching T.V."

"I'm waiting for you to answer my question, Jaken," she said, sounding just as grumpy. "Did you even hear me? I asked you several times. Were you sleeping? Do you sleep with your eyes open?"

"Of course not! Silly girl, I barely even _need _to sleep! I'm not as weak as you…"

"So I found this book," Rin interrupted him, not even pretending to be interested in his rebuttal. "Have you seen it before?"

Jaken craned his neck to try and see around her. The screen had changed to a variety show, with the names and faces of _tarento* _he didn't know. The stage audience was laughing at something that he couldn't read at the bottom of the scree. Rin was still in the way, her hands tugging at the swathing blue folds of her skirt.

"Well, what do you want anyway? And where have you been?" he demanded.

"In the library, studying. That's why I came here, I wanted to ask you a question. I found this book…"

"I couldn't understand a lot of the kanji in it. I think they're really old books, they don't even have hiragana* in them."

"Of course you couldn't read them; you're just a young girl. It's amazing that you can even read at all, much less attempt to read such old treasures…."

"Most people can read," Rin returned testily. "And so can I; I'm not _stupid! _I don't think many people older than me know how to read such old and outdated kanji, either! I think they're the type that might be on a college entrance exam or something, but…_"_

Jaken leaned forward, motioning for the book. "Give me that," he said, and Rin relinquished it to him. He didn't have any interest in helping her, but he was curious all the same. The book was a mossy, mottled green in his hands. It was bound in the old way, with string knitting together the thin double-sided parchment, and a cover composed of thick strands of broad silk. It didn't feel as natural to hold in his grip as the end of a scroll, but it had been a long time since he had held one of those. Likely as not, they wouldn't feel natural in his hands anymore, either. He hadn't been inclined to do much reading ever since the quantity of it had surged in modern times.

He brushed aside the cover and flipped the first few pages of her tome. "...A history of the samurai lines in Kyushu?"

"Yes."

He peered at her, trying to determine her game. This was a far cry from her usual reading material. "I can't help but wonder what you find interesting about an old registry of nobleman's houses and patriarchal lines."

"Well, isn't the Inutaisho family from Kyushu?"

Jaken answered warily. "A long time ago, yes."

He would have told her more, but the truth was that he didn't know many stories of Sesshoumaru's grandfather. His lord, of course, should have some idea, but he had never granted Jaken a hearing, and Jaken had never asked. That great dog youkai had lived and died so long before Jaken's time that memories of the magnificent creature had all but been purged from the land. It had happened before humans had begun writing, certainly. It hardly mattered now.

"Well, I didn't see any of the Inutaisho's family names in here, and I thought it was strange because they were supposed to be an old and great family…" Rin trailed off, waiting for Jaken to break in. He had nothing to say.

He had hoped that she wouldn't continue the line of questioning from the night before, and he could not help growing impatient with her persistence. "The Inutaisho is one of the greatest lines in all of Japan," he snapped. "It's not my concern whether you can find them in an old book or not."

"But I can't seem to find anything in new books, either," said Rin. "And I noticed there were no photo albums in the library. I want to know what Sesshoumaru's mother and father are like, at least."

"They're both dead."

"That's what I thought," said Rin, sounding genuinely sad, as if they were her _own _family and not spiritual beings who could have killed her without batting an eyelash; without experiencing even a moment of guilt. "…I figured that Sesshoumaru-san would have had me meet them before I became their granddaughter, at least on paper. Sesshoumaru-san never even talks about them. I wonder if they'd like me."

"It's pointless to speculate, but if you have to know…"

Rin's innocent expression of interest was sincere enough that Jaken felt sick. Further, he felt sick when he realized that he couldn't bring himself to let her down with words that would approach the truth.

"His father was something of a… philanthropist, especially towards people like you."

Rin overlooked the veiled insult, however. "What was his mother like?"

"Much colder, but only on the surface. Beautiful, too, but she was better known for her wit and her headstrong character. But you'd know that, of course; didn't you meet her?"

"_Eh?_" Rin was confused. "When?"

…_When you died. _Jaken nearly said it aloud before everything rushed back.

"In the metaphorical sense," he covered. "Her ashes are in an urn around here somewhere."

Rin looked at him skeptically, but Jaken blustered on, lying baldly. "Sesshoumaru-sama likes to think that her spirit is still with us."

"That doesn't sound like him."

"His mother knew him better than anyone, except for _me _of course. But before I knew him, she was his only friend for many years. Her loss affected him deeply."

"Oh… I see. In that case, I think it's… really sweet of him." Rin smiled with an unusual depth of compassion in her eyes, looking as if she were even tears. The sight discomfited Jaken. She was still too much of a child to be able to empathize with others. And as she was human, she could never really know what death was. She would only be at the edge of understanding life when she met the end of her own, assuming that she actually died of old age this time around.

Rin moved away from the T.V. The previous program had ended, and been replaced by an NHK special on the forests of Tochigi. A narrator's voice droned with precise enunciation about the man-made lakes and the rugged, isolated mountains still possessed by more raccoon-dogs and baboons than people. Rin, now beside him, took a seat on the floor and spread her skirt over her knees. It fell onto the carpet like a pool of water covered in flowers. Life spilled out of her.

"How did she die?"

Jaken flinched. "What?"

"How did Sesshoumaru's mother die?" Rin repeated.

"Natural causes."

"She couldn't have been that old, though. I mean, how old is Sesshoumaru-san? He can't be too much over thirty, right?"

"So typical of young people to be such poor judges," Jaken scoffed. "He's much older."

"How much older? Don't tell me he's shy about it."

Jaken sneered. "Then I won't tell you."

"Why not? I know he's _Showa,* _at least, it's not such a big deal…"

The hum of the television only interrupted them for a moment before Rin continued her questioning.

"What about his birthday? Can't you tell me that? I want to make sure I do something special for him."

"I don't know his birthday."

"Really?" Rin appeared floored. "Why not?"

"It wasn't important."

"That's silly. It should have come up when you've been doing work for him, at least."

As a matter of fact, Jaken wasn't sure _why _it hadn't come up over all the years they had been associated with each other. But then, they were both youkai. For them, years were merely markers of time for something that would soon become very, very far away. The days of birth hadn't mattered as much before, as well. There had been a time before calendars. He remembered when the time was kept only by the sun, and not by the back of a hand.

"I guess I could find it in a temple registry somewhere…" Rin's voice trailed through the air as their conversation petered out. The room wasn't quiet, though; the documentary on the T.V. had moved on to a discussion of the water purification process near the city of Kegon. Jaken found his attention now riveted intently as Urami, Shiraito, and the names of dozens of mildly tumbling cascades raced forward to the front of his mind. He could see them all, clouded by white steam in the morning, both sparkling and shadowed beneath sun and tree. He could remember without the explicit memory - his brain could only hold so much after so many years, after so many years - the smooth caress of the chilled water, more embracing than dousing. His heart pounded in his chest with longing. He wanted to go there so badly. The feeling, the urge consumed him as if it could drown him. _How nice_, he thought, _that would be._

In the corner of his vision, a skirt rippled like a river covered in blossoms, most unlike the winter that surrounded him. Rin was standing in the midst of the water, spreading her fingers out to say goodbye. Her smile only turned up a little bit before she walked away, leaving Jaken stranded in a dead patch of water wedged between two currents in a stream.

.

_**Evening**  
>Jaken<em>

"You'll be back _when_?"

"Three days from now."

Sesshoumaru's voice was scratchy through the receiver, nearly inaudible through the static. It could have been the reception, distance, or anything - Jaken couldn't tell - his senses, as they were, had always prevented him from hearing on phones without interference threatening to drown out the other's voice. When he had a phone pressed against his ear, it felt like holding on and screaming into a thunderstorm where each word crashed violently into the next.

Jake fought to clear his mind.

"It seems sudden, Sesshoumaru-san; _far too sudden._ Why hadn't Takoko-san arranged this meeting weeks in advance? And why was it done with so much rush? We're barely mid-quarter, we haven't even put up our projections…"

"This has more to do with… shareholder value." Lightning cackled over the line. "I… new investments… follow my instincts."

Jaken closed his eyes, feeling weak, almost woozy. "My lord," he acquiesced, "That's all very well, but what should I do until you return?"

When the reply came to him inaudible, he tried again, raising his voice. "What should I do with _the girl_?"

"It is your job to take care of her… She… be fine."

"But think of the timing of it! She barely has left the library all day. I think she is-"

"Studying hard will do her good." Even as Sesshoumaru paused, the clouds rumbled; the silence was swallowed by white noise. "Tatsuro Maeda is approaching… must go."

"But, Rin is-" tried Jaken, clutching the phone with both hands, as if the action could lend vehemence and sympathy to his plea.

"Make the adjustments we discussed."

Without another word the line went dead, and Jaken was left holding the phone in his hands. It was warm, still pulsing from the electrical storm. As he looked at it, his palms sweaty and his fingers shaking, the screen changed back to the desktop. It was an image of a single water droplet falling into a pool, and the divot that occurred in the water right before the ripple surged outward from the source of impact.

"Jaken?"

"Gah!" The youkai jumped several inches into the air before recovering. "What is it!"

Rin stood in the doorway, her head slightly cocked to the side. Her expression was curious, if not concerned, and she had her hair tucked back behind her left ear.

"Is Sesshoumaru-san coming home late?"

"How did you know that I was talking with him? Were you spying?"

"You were yelling into the phone," Rin shrugged. "I couldn't help overhearing a little."

"…I have hearing problems," Jaken defended himself. He rubbed his ears, glad that the illusion was in place, for at least she wouldn't see the discoloring on his earlobes from the char of lightning strikes. There would be at least another day until his youkai powers healed him, and he had too much pride to withstand her mocking him until then.

"You don't have problems hearing all the time, though," said Rin. She was obviously thinking back to several sidelong comments she had made in Jaken's hearing range, which he had both overheardand viciously defended against.

"Just wait until you're old as I am, and see what it's like. The body isn't as consistent as you would think. As it stands…" Jaken cleared his throat. "My lord left a message for me to deliver to you. He said that he won't be returning tonight, or for several days."

Rin was taken aback. "Days? Not just for dinner, but for days? How long? And why?"

"It's for business, and the length is not your concern. He'll tell us when it's time for him to return, and we will prepare."

"Well, that's not very thoughtful of him," Rin said boldly.

"He had no reason to be thinking of you," Jaken returned with vinegar. "It is his _job_. However, before you get upset, although our conversation was cut off early, he left a message for you."

"What did he say?"

"That your private _ikebana_ lessons will be discontinued. He has asked me to sign you up for a different program."

"A different program?" she echoed in disbelief.

"Group lessons, apparently," said Jaken, wrinkling his nose. "At a shop near the North Tower. In European style this time."

"Oh." Rin stared at the floor. "I see."

"Well, be grateful, girl! It's what you wanted, isn't it?"

"It's what I wanted, but..."

"But _what_?"

"I wish Sesshoumaru-san had called and talked to me about it himself."

Jaken huffed. "You don't have to be a needy brat about everything. Surely you can survive a day without being near him…"

"Funny for you to be saying that," Rin muttered under her breath. Before Jaken could properly respond through his embarrassed anger, however, she was speaking to him directly. "I'm going to go take a bath now, but there was one more thing I wanted to ask you about first."

"Yes?" Jaken glanced at her in suspicion. If she had to receive permission to ask in the first place, he doubted that she had a question for him that he was interested in answering.

"I went looking for the urn like you suggested, but I didn't find one anywhere."

"Of course not. You didn't go into Sesshoumaru's room."

"Yes, I did. We sometimes meditate there in the mornings, and I've never seen one in there."

"Well, you were obviously too busy meditating to see what was in front of your eyes," Jaken snapped.

"I think you just made that whole story up," said Rin, matter-of-factly.

Jaken cringed. "Why would I have done that?"

"I don't know, but I'm going to find out." She turned on her heel, and her hair fanned out behind her dramatically.

"Sesshoumaru-sama will be displeased with you!" he called after her. "You shouldn't do this!"

The only response he heard was a slamming door, and its echo in the lonely apartment. His hearing, at least for the moment, was more than adequate.

_._

_March 24, 2006_**  
>Rin<strong>

The next morning, Rin woke up early and got ready for her lesson. She pointedly ignored Jaken, and he didn't speak to her in turn, keeping his wrinkled, blubbery face hidden behind a newspaper instead.

He had, however, made her breakfast. This lifted a bit of Rin's anger, though not all of it. She decided that she would reconsider talking to him again later. The apartment was very lonely without Sesshoumaru, and imposing in its grandeur. Strange that she would have used those same words to describe Sesshoumaru, but tempered with a sense of protectiveness and safety, as if he held more sense of home in him than her home itself.

As she stepped into the elevator, she put in the ear buds for her iPod, glad to break the silence around her. But she quickly took them out again, preferring to hear the sounds of the miniature city of Roppongi Hills instead. She no longer got lost or even especially distracted in her wanderings through the residence's giant complex, of course; that had only been an issue in her first few weeks. However, even now, the sensation of being lost never seemed far behind. She wondered if it was a symptom of the streets or if it was a flaw that lurked deep beneath her skin, that no amount of walking could drive away, that she could not belong.

In the Hills, each section flowed into another, hooked by cavernous limestone walkways designed for ascension at queer and tall diagonals, lit on the sides by balls of light glowing behind low wall panels like spots of fox-fire.

The walkways gave way to open-air plazas lined by a row of shops and miniature gardens with rock-studded footpaths that shot out out like curling vines. Without any clear linear path before her, Rin always found herself orbiting the center of those spaces in wide and weaving circles, like she was trapped in the labyrinthine shell of a snail, from which emerged wide and elegantly structured walkways of cobbled marble. The paths of these bridges between outdoor corridors never seemed to meet, but seemed completely differed from every change in perspective- from above especially - and never led somewhere straight away, but instead, at the most stunning and sharp angle.

If the object was beauty, then the Hills succeeded, though not in a lavish and overbearing way like a French oil painting. Still, it was still a very self-conscious refinement. Rin often felt she were looking at something splendid but not fully pleasing, like an implication of a more pure beauty than it could claim for itself; like the light in a pair of eyes rather than the light or the eyes themselves.

In the middle of the shiny shopping arcades, where the light fixtures were so hidden away that they could have been mistaken for shaded sunlight, films of water fell from the ceiling into pansy and marble lined pools. Yet a dark evening in the midst of a forest, with the smells and sounds of that place besides would be just as beautiful as this, Rin often thought, and far less work to maintain. Now that would be a place in which she thought she could be lost forever.

Rin walked on, at last descending from the walkways of the main buildings, and came to the farthest edge of the Northern Tower. The Hills broke out here onto a one-way street that was filled, suddenly, where rows of flat and gray buildings were crammed together like passengers on a train. Both telephone wires and green bags of tied garbage spilled out from the homes, either over the curb into the streets, waiting to be picked up by the trucks, or up into the sky as if hung there to trip birds mid-flight. There were signs everywhere, of all fonts and sizes and degrees of dilapidation. This was a world she knew keenly. This was the world she had lived in before. But now it loomed in the distance, seeming both close and far away.

It occurred to Rin that she hadn't left the complex in nearly a month; not even to pick up ice cream. Everything she needed was right at her fingertips, just like Jaken had told her on their first morning together. She could easily imagine herself living in the surreal bubble of Sesshoumaru's penthouse forever. It was comfortable, and it wasn't scary, but - and this was an important 'but' - it wasn't quite her own.

Neither was the world beyond, however.

Rin fished out the flower shop's reservation card from her bag, and checked the map. Her destination was only a few buildings away, and surprisingly unpretentious. The flowers, however, spoke for themselves. Asters and lilies filled the shop window from the floor to the ceiling, consuming her vision with soft folding shades of white.

Rin didn't hesitate for a second longer; she pulled the door open to the store and let herself be overwhelmed. All of her conflicted feelings were pushed aside for the moment; they could be dealt with later. A shopkeeper's polite voice rang out in greeting and a little bell chimed as the door closed behind Rin. The smell of car exhaust and polluted air all retreated. As Rin was surrounded by the scents of everything that was natural and beautiful - and most importantly, furiously and vividly alive - she felt her smile blooming on her face.

For now, at least, she didn't feel so _lost_.

.

*tarento - a transcription of the word "talent," describing a Japanese entertainer. In the Japanese entertainment industry, famous people generally work as a combination of at least two of the following: TV host/guest, comedian, model, actor, singer, sports star. If they are only talented in one area they rarely gain national acclaim.

*hiragana, kanji - Japanese has three (or four, including roman alphabet) writing systems. Kanji is the term for Chinese character set, whereas hiragana is the phonetic alphabet.

*NHK special - NHK stands for the (translated) Japanese Broadcasting Company. It has a generally more academic and higher-brow news and special interest stories and programs than other non-cable television channels.

*Showa - A secondary system used in Japan instead of the Roman calendar. For example, a person born in 1988 would be "born in the 63rd year of Emperor Showa's reign."


	8. Chapter 8

.

Bird on a Wire

.

**eight**

.

_March 25, 2006_

**Rin**

Rin was nearly finished searching the library. She only had two shelves left in the study that she hadn't scoured book by book and page by page. They were at the corner of the room near the full-length glass windows, and as the morning light streamed into the room, Rin found them impossible to look at directly from the glare.

Frustratingly, Rin didn't feel like she had made any substantial progress since Aya had left her to it several days ago. Over the course of the week, she hadn't learned anything about Sesshoumaru or the Inutaisho family. She had, however, found a substantial number of books written in English, as well as some completely indecipherable scrolls that Jaken wouldn't translate for her - he was too busy watching the television, he would claim, as his wrinkled, spotted hand reached for the remote or a sake cup, or sometimes to scratch at his bottom.

As she took down the last stacks of books from the shelves, she spared a few glances out the window. The sky was overcast, but the pane was warm, a sure sign that spring was coming. She resolved to spend more time outside as soon as she could, and sat back against the glass, letting it warm the back of her head.

She picked up the first book from her pile. It was a thickly bound**,** black book titled _Mythology and Folklore from Around the World. _Of course, it would be yet another completely obscure title, she thought, and flipped open to a random page. Rather than lines of small, difficult to follow text, she was treated to a graphically depicted image of swirling, raging hungry ghosts in the Buddhist underworld. Shivering uncomfortably, she closed the volume and set it aside.

The next book proclaimed itself in silver lettering to be _The Definitive Guide to the Spirits of the European Continent_. Not even wasting time to scan its pages, Rin moved to the next book, _The Sword and the Jewel: Legends of Demons and Humans from Ancient Japan_. She gave pause to look at its cover. This book was much newer than the others, by at least fifty years. It was probably one of the newest books she had seen in the entire collection, and it had the peculiar scent of freshly printed pages. On its shiny cover, she saw an old painting of a demon superimposed above a photo of a shrine in the mountains. Rin scanned the picture, debating whether or not the scene depicted the famous mountain shrine of Yamagata. Her gaze caught on the name of the author, and she was taken aback with surprise.

Could it be...?

She turned back the cover and flipped to the inside of the book. There, on the blank page before the title, she found the author's signature, and a dedication written in flowing sumi-e ink:

_Thanks for setting the story straight. _

_Sota Higurashi_

_May 2004_

Rin could hardly believe it. The young priest of the Higurashi shrine was a published author! And not only that, Sesshoumaru - Sota's brother-in-law - had helped him write his book.

Of all the things Rin thought she might learn about Sesshoumaru, this had to be the least expected. She tried weighing the ideaof him as a scholarly Japanese historian in her mind and couldn't. He seemed too practical, business-like, and globally-minded to waste his time writing a history book - much less to spend time studying history in the first place. If anything, it seemed like an endeavor that Jaken would've undertaken. That besides, what did Sota have to do with anything?

"Hello**,** Rin!"

Rin looked up, startled. "Aya!" she exclaimed. "I didn't even hear you come in."

"Sorry about that," Aya apologized, slipping off her periwinkle blazer with a soft sigh. "How are you?"

"I'm fine. Where's Jaken?"

"He's sleeping on the couch. What's that you're working on?"

"Nothing, just…" Rin began shelving the books. "Well, I was working on the project that we talked about last time, you know, about the Inutaisho family."

"Of course. How's it going?"

"Not so great. I haven't really found anything out yet, though I just found a book written by someone I know."

"Oh? I didn't realize your family was connected in literary circles," said Aya, looking curiously at the book in Rin's hand.

"We're not really," Rin answered after a pause. She couldn't decide whether that was true or not, or whether it was Aya's business. Sota's book, more than anything else she had found, seemed like it might reveal a tiny piece of Sesshoumaru to her, if not something about his family. Deciding to think on it later, Rin slipped the volume under her arm and started shelving the other books.

"It's too bad you haven't gotten anywhere with all your research," said Aya sympathetically. "It sure looks like you've been working hard - this whole room smells like it's been airing out. But maybe that's just the flowers." She moved around the desk, her fingers lightly trailing against the hard wood as she circled the floral centerpiece. The bouquet was so full at the top that the blossoms and leaves appeared to have been squeezed in from one end of the cloisonné vase, only to burst out from the other end. "Did you arrange these?" she asked.

"Yeah, on Tuesday."

Aya leaned over the desk and breathed in the smell of the big-faced daisies. Her bright hair glinted under the light in golden ribbons. "It's nice. It's a completely different style from your last few arrangements."

"I started taking a class instead of getting private lessons. Actually, I made a friend there," said Rin. She stood up, brushed off her skirt and made her way to the table where Aya had already begun to unload the papers and books for their lessons in neat, geometric piles.

"That's great. I'm glad you're getting out more."

"Yeah, sometimes. It's not like I'm going very far away, though. The school is near the station for the Hibiya train line."

"So you're still staying around the Residence," Aya commented, her eyes on her preparations rather than on Rin. "When was the last time you saw any of your old friends?"

Rin shrugged. "Not for a long time."

"Really? But I'm sure you want to, right?"

"Ri-" Rin caught herself before she said her name aloud. "I didn't have many friends before."

"I find that hard to believe."

"Well, I never joined a club, so I didn't have much of a chance to talk to people outside of class. There was one girl I was friends with, but she transferred out a few months before I did. It's not like I didn't want to hang out with people, but I didn't talk very much, so my classmates ignored me for the most part."

"That's a shame," said Aya, frowning. She looked up at last. "I wouldn't ignore you. I think we would have been friends."

"Well, you'd have been my teacher anyway," Rin compromised as she slid into her seat.

.

_Afternoon_

"It's too cold for you to be sitting outside without the heater on."

Jaken had his arms crossed as he stood in the doorway to the balcony, the glass sliding door just barely cracked enough for him to squeeze his short**,** pudgy body in-between the crevice dividing the inside and the outside of the apartment.

"There's no need to burn fuel," said Rin. "Today's a bit warmer than yesterday."

"You're wearing a jacket and two blankets!" Jaken contended.

"Well if you're so concerned you can make me a cup of cocoa."

Jaken didn't answer, and instead looked at the high, white sky.

"Jaken?" Rin prodded. "Jaken? Jaken? Jaaa-keen…"

He finally turned back to her, flummoxed. "What do you want? I was thinking!"

"About what?"

"Birds."

Rin peered up into the sky. "I don't see anything."

"No," Jaken shook his head, his eyes still lifted up and searching. "You don't see them flying around in Tokyo."

Rin returned to her book. She was at the second chapter now, outlining the history and rituals of some of the temples and shrines around old Edo, or Tokyo. History had always been her favorite subject, even though it was usually really hard to read about it in her textbooks. Sota Higurashi seemed passionate, though, so it was interesting and easy to read what he had to say. It was as if he had been writing diary entries or a blog rather than attempting to make a compact history of the spiritual world. That made sense to her. He seemed too cool and young in comparison to the historians she saw so often on television documentaries or the back covers of books. She was quickly immersed.

Before she realized any time had past, Rin heard a loud harrumph from Jaken. When she looked up, she saw that he was standing beside her with a steaming mug in his hands. He must have left and made it for him; she hadn't been paying him any attention.

"Take this," he said, shoving the drink beneath her nose.

"Tha-"

"This isn't for _you_! Our master will blame me if you get ill, girl, that's all."

"Still, thanks," Rin repeated. She took a whiff of the aroma - only to find it lacking in any whatsoever. "Wait, Jaken. Is this just water? Is this just _hot water_? That's gross, you know."

"No it isn't. Water is healthier. It's pure," he defended.

"But when it's hot, it's so tasteless."

"It's pure," he repeated.

"_Jaken_," she complained.

"Rin, you will get sick!" he croaked. "This weather will make you weak."

"It's nearly spring," Rin returned, and stuck out her tongue.

Then, before he could reply, she bent over her book and returned to the section on the purification rites of the shrine keepers and their protective roles over feudal villages. She could hear him raving at her, but that only made it more funny to ignore him. She buried her nose in a long paragraph, illustrated at the top with an image of a great tree wrapped in sacred ropes. This section described the history of the Higurashi shrine in particular, and how it had allegedly held a purifying stone for several hundred years before the artifact mysteriously disappeared and caused a series of disturbances across the area. People and demons alike went mad with power, with rage, and with sorrow.

Something felt like it was flickering in the back of Rin's mind. But when she tried to reach for it, it vanished.

.

March 25, 2006

**Sesshoumaru**

Sesshoumaru, in boredom, tapped his pen against the stack of papers of a clear file. His cell phone lay on its side on top of the desk, and the little light blinking in the upper right corner of the device was the only indication that it was in use and had not been abandoned.

Jaken's voice poured out from the speaker amidst a crackle of reception interference. "How long, my lord?"

"I will be gone for three nights," he informed Jaken. "Tetsuo Matsui insists that we personally discuss the details of our enterprise at length."

"Of course, my lord, of course."

Sesshoumaru paused, trying to correctly word his next thoughts. "Do you think Rin will be distressed?"

"She is not such a child. She will understand, even though she is stupid."

"Jaken," Sesshoumaru warned.

"I will tell her. Oh, she is coming now. One moment, my lord." Jaken's voice drew away from the receiver. "Rin! Sesshoumaru has a message for you-"

_"Where's my book?"_

Sesshoumaru heard the anger in Rin's voice as distinctly as if she were in front of him, and paused in the shuffling of his papers. What had Jaken done? He would punish Jaken if he had done something to upset his Rin.

_"I don't know what you're talking about_, _I have no interest or need for your things,_" said Jaken with arrogant disinterest.

_"Then why can't I find the book I was reading earlier?"_

_"What book was that?"_

_"The one written by Sota Higurashi."_

Sesshoumaru was out of his chair in a split second and at the door before he had time to think through the impulse. His mind raced. How could she have found that book? he wondered. And how much had she read? What did she think she knew? What consequences would it have on their lives if she were to guess what he and Jaken were?

_"I don't know what you were doing taking that book out of the library in the first place. It's none of your business what Higurashi-boushi wrote."_

_"Are you kidding? He's my friend and my family, why wouldn't I read his book? Or, more to the point, why couldn't I?"_

Jaken spluttered, unable to reply. Sesshoumaru's grip tightened on his phone as Rin continued.

_"Is there something in there that you don't want me to see?"_

_"Rin…"_

_"I'm right, aren't I!"_

_"No!"_

_"Then give it back to me!"_

_"No!"_

_"Why not?"_

_"Because you __**can't**__ read it!"_

_"Well, I'm going to find out, you know! I'm going to find out what you're keeping from me! You and Sesshoumaru-san both!"_

_"Rin-"_

The line went dead.

Sesshoumaru's heart was racing in his chest, but he did not show it. He walked out of his office, his stride long and even as ever as he walked down the hall and passed the room of glass-walled cubicles until he had reached his secretary, hitting the side of a copy machine while muttering at it.

"Miss Hara."

The young woman went ram-rod straight, and looked up at Sesshoumaru from beneath her thin eyelashes with the guilty expression worn by a child being caught at his naughtiest.

She patted down her hair. "Sesshoumaru-san. How can I help you?"

"I need you to cancel my plans for the trip with Matsui."

"Yes, Sesshoumaru-san," said Hara in poorly masked bewilderment. He turned on his heel to return to his office, and she ran after him. Her stilettos tapped against the shiny floor as she caught up with him. "Wait! Wait, what should I tell him? He will be very…. disappointed, I think."

Sesshoumaru did not wait, or turn around. He thought only of Rin's angry voice as she yelled at Jaken, the way she had hesitated before leaving with him from the flower shop after her lesson, the shock in her eyes when Jaken burst from the table and announced the sins of his brother.

"I have a more pressing engagement," he said, and left the office.

.

_March 25, 2006_

_**Evening**_

_Rin_

Rin had decided that she would not talk to him.

She'd never tried this tactic on anyone as taciturn as Sesshoumaru before. Nor had she tried it in such a quiet place as a park at night, and while it made her strategy all the more effective, it also made it that much more difficult to accomplish. It went against her nature to stay silent when she had so much she wanted to say, but at least she had been able to talk _at_ Jaken for easily thirty minutes before Sesshoumaru had arrived.

She occupied herself by playing with the ruffled ivory hem of her shirt.

"This is because of Jaken's behavior this afternoon." Sesshoumaru's voice came from nothing.

"Yes," said Rin, and she bit her bottom lip down, restraining herself from elaborating. It took such an effort that she lost sight of where she was, and tripped on a loose stone on the path. No sooner than she had let out a cry, Sesshoumaru's hand had shot out and gripped her arm, keeping her upright before she'd even begun to fall forward. She pulled away, flushing from embarrassment, unable to meet his intense but searching gaze.

"Rin."

"Yes?"

"Do you…" Sesshoumaru clearly considered his words before he continued, "You are clearly upset. Do you feel that I'm keeping something from you?"

Rin avoided looking at him. "I didn't say that."

"It was not necessary for you to do so."

She huffed. "What, so now you know what I'm thinking?"

Sesshoumaru raised an eyebrow.

"Well, you as much as said that you know why I'm upset. In that case, you know as well I do that I'm not to to blame for being angry."

"I don't."

"You don't _what_? You don't blame me or you don't know what I mean?"

Sesshoumaru met her eyes evenly, but did not speak. Rin was fed up.

"It would be too much for you to say _anything_, wouldn't it?" she snapped. "If you're not going to tell me anything about your secrets, I don't know why you even brought it up. Why did you even ask me to come walk around the lake with you? I have nothing to talk to you about! Just… just questions that you won't answer, and requests to do things that you won't let me do!"

As soon as the words were spoken, Rin felt a sense of shock equal to that which she had meant to impart to Sesshoumaru. She could hardly believe what she had just done. She had never spoken back to Sesshoumaru before; not even once. She had never thought that she'd had the need to, much less that she had the right to, and was terrified that he might come down upon her like he had on Jaken.

But Sesshoumaru did not rise to her challenge in an way except by tightening the skin around his mouth and by all appearances dismissing her. As he walked ahead of her down the pebble trail, Rin felt shame slowly encroaching and breaching the well of her anger.

She looked at her hands, clenched into fists, and slowly uncurled them. She wondered what had happened to make her emotions so jumbled, and why she couldn't just be happy. It felt wrong, and painfully ungrateful of her to be asking for more from the man who had already saved her life and given her a home. But an expectation in her refused to be satisfied. She wanted things to be open between them. She wanted to feel like their relationship was unbounded. Didn't Sesshoumaru want that, too? Why did he have to keep secrets from her?

The sound of creaking**,** weathered wooden boards broke Rin from her thoughts. Without being aware of it, she and Sesshoumaru had already walked halfway around the pond. Her feet were on the first panels of a low**, **wooden bridge that hooked onto a tiny island covered in stone and marsh bushes, at the furthest reach of the garden's water feature. Sesshoumaru stood still at the top of the bridge, at the edge of the dimly lit bamboo forest. He rested his hands on the edge of the cold and dew-soaked railing, apparently taking in the scene, and for a moment, her as well.

"Come," he said, staring directly into her eyes. Somehow the words turned into a request rather than a command. Biting down against her feelings, she came to his side, heeling like a dog.

Everything seemed to fall away as they traveled more deeply into the thicket; as the smell of fresh oxygen rose up and pushed away the pungent smog of the inner city. The serenity of the wild space settled over Rin's shoulders like a muffler whose job it was to impart peace rather than warmth alone. She had no choice but to acquiesce, and to unwind some of the thoughts and feelings polluting her inside.

"Are you better?" Sesshoumaru asked her after some time, in a way approaching, but not quite reaching tact.

"I'm not happy with you," she answered. "I wish you'd just tell me anything. You know, _anything."_

Sesshoumaru neither responded nor denied that there was something being kept from her. He didn't respond at all, and her borrowed serenity wavered. She frowned, feeling less like she had moved on from her anger than that she'd just allowed it to slip behind her into the shadows, to wait to come upon her again as soon as her footing strayed. She wished that she could be as in control and impenetrable as Sesshoumaru.

She moved her attention to the pond. The surface was as black as the night, and the colors were nearly as deep. In the place of reflections of stars, towers with lit windows waved at their spectators, traipsing around the pond. She sighed longingly, moving her gaze from the scenery and directly down to the mirror image of her own face.

The girl in the water was clearly well-cared for, so well-groomed that it was nearly off-putting, but her expression was not so much happier as Rin would have expected. Uncomfortable with the thought, she moved her eyes to Sesshoumaru's image on the water beside her own. She studied him so often on their walks in the night; it was hardly something she controlled, really. It was as if some force of his personality drew her to him. Even just looking at him in the water, he seemed to glow, lit by his own light, dimly shining as if by the light of the crescent moon that sat above him.

Squinting her eyes, Rin waited for the effect to fade. When it didn't, a chill traveled up her spine. It prickled at the top of her neck like the beginning of sweat.

Something was wrong. Whereas her reflected face was clear, albeit somehow different from the girl she thought she was, Sesshoumaru's face was indecipherable, even hidden from her. In the water, she couldn't distinguish a single part of him that wasn't covered by his suit - not the planes of his face, his black hair with its shocks of gray, or even the delicacy of his hands. The water rippled over him at every point, veiling his features, enshrouding him in tiny waves. Yet, she noticed in confusion, the water on the pond wasn't choppy anywhere else. It laidflat, reflecting a still and perfect image describing the city, and the interplays of its lights and shadows. Rin leaned toward the water, bending as close as she dared toward the distorted image of Sesshoumaru, gaining centimeter by centimeter.

"Rin."

She stopped in her movement.

"What's wrong with your reflection?" she asked, and turned to him. His eyes flicked away from her and to the water, quick as lightning.

"…Nothing." Sesshoumaru removed his hands from the bridge and returned to his full height, brushing off unseen lint from his left shoulder.

"But…" Rin glanced back at the water. She could no longer see him in it, even leaning on the wooden railing as she was. He had hidden himself from her. Why couldn't she see him?

"You saw nothing," he repeated firmly from behind her.

"Then why won't you just come back and humor me?" Rin attempted a pleasing, conducive smile to no effect. Sesshoumaru did not move - and not only did he not move, he no longer seemed as if he were a creature that could be moved, as if he were a statue of a man, his expression shuttered, and the light was too dim for her to see any of its details anyway.

Not even understanding why, Rin began to feel anxious.

"Come on, Sesshoumaru-san…"

"Let's go." His voice was firmer, this time. She shook her head.

_"_No."

"No?"

She hesitated.

It was crazy. She had to be crazy. But why wouldn't Sesshoumaru just come back to the water? Was he _afraid_? And then, why?

Rin felt herself being surrounded by a fear that she could not grasp onto or give name. There had to be some connection between Sesshoumaru's reflection, and his secret - an image of Sota's book flashed in her mind - and his brother's death, too - everything _had_ to be wrapped up together. But none of it made sense.

"I want you to come back to _me_," she repeated. "I saw something, just now. Something's… something's wrong with you."

He still didn't turn around.

"Didn't you hear me? Where are you going, just wait a second…! _Sesshoumaru-san!_"

He was walking away. He was actually leaving her there on the dock, because she would not go with him. Because she had seen something she wasn't meant to have seen.

_Unbelievable! Unbelievable! _she thought as she watched him striding away, easily twenty meters ahead of her now, at the edge of a patch of bamboo forest.

Accent lighting set into the ground,thrust the lights against the walls of thickly packed bamboo, fanning golden-green triangles of light over the velvet darkness that ran between and above the stalks. Rin called out again, but he had slipped away into the fold of the forest, and his footsteps on the gravel path went silent.

Rin swallowed, as panic entered her precisely where anger had scorched a mark already that evening. But she did not want to be controlled by it. She spared a final glance at her reflection, hoping to steal courage from an image that was braver than the real thing, and dashed down the bridge and after Sesshoumaru into the tall and leafy maze.

Her heart pounded in her ears. She refused to think, instead watching her feet on the path, each pounding step moving her forward until she found him.

He hadn't been that far away after all. He was half-hidden in a circle of towering stalks, lit golden-green against a largely obscured black drape of sky. He stared up at the edge of the moon, dangling above the bamboo forest like the light at the exit of an obelisk. In the clearing, he looked like a cryptograph beneath a spotlight, indecipherable yet impossible to put aside or to ignore.

"What are you doing?" Rin burst out, breathless. "Were you waiting for me here?"

Sesshoumaru's expression and body said nothing, even as he answered, "Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you can't go home alone."

"And that's it?" Rin stalked toward him. "That's _it_?"

She was directly in front of him now, yet he stood unyielding, his eyes impassive. All the anger and fear punctuated by silence, preluded by confusion and secrecy, bent her heart at last until it broke. The words choked up in her throat, and she began to cry.

"Rin?"

She shook her head.

Nothing made sense. Nothing felt safe, or right anymore, and what made it worse was that she couldn't even tell if it was his fault or her own. She wiped at her eyes before her first tears could fall down her cheeks, not willing to add tracks to her shame in front of Sesshoumaru.

She reached her hand up to wipe again at her cheek a second time, but she was stopped midway. Sesshoumaru's hand had clasped her fingers. Without a word, he placed a handkerchief into her hand. It was his. She knew it by his smell, sharp like cedars after the rain. The touch was hot enough to burn her, and the linen soft enough to make her sick. She pushed him away, and shook her head, trying to clear it and feeling as if she were at the verge of shaking everything out of it instead.

"Rin," he said again. She closed her eyes tightly shut, feeling that she could notbear to see him as she broke down before him.

"Why are you doing this to me? Sesshoumaru-san…"

"I am doing nothing."

"Yes," Rin continued in frustration, "You're doing nothing and you're saying nothing. But I can't… I can't handle all of these secrets. How am I supposed to feel safe with you when I know you're hiding something from me?"

She rubbed her eyes with her loose hand, blurring her vision for a moment. His voice, and not just the features of his face, traveled to her as if through a fog.

"You don't know what you're asking for," he said.

"And you're avoiding the question," she returned. "But I don't understand why. How bad can it really be?"

At Sesshoumaru's silence, Rin allowed herself a shallow breath to guide her as she dredged up memories. She stared down at her feet and the pebbles scattered at her toes.

"It's not like the Inutaisho's are the only family that has… history," she added. Sesshoumaru snorted, and while it offended Rin's pride, at least he was making efforts to communicate again. With a deep breath, she sought and found her courage once more.

"I mean, maybe my family didn't have any secrets but that's just because it didn't have any pride in the first place. Rika's mother and I, we lived in the baraku before she died, before you took me in. You know what that means. Rika was, that is, most people thought that _I_ was, filth. That's all I had as a legacy. How could I think less of yours? And since you adopted me, isn't it our shared legacy now, anyway? Why can't you just trust me?" Her voice broke as she finished. "Why are you hiding from me?"

A wind rustled through the leaves in the bamboo, raising up the scent of cold and wet dirt. Rin shifted her body so that the wind would glance off of her back, and only then did Sesshoumaru allow her hand to slide out from his own. They had been standing still for so long, that at the sudden loss of his heat, she felt the chill seeping into her like the earth.

"It is not a matter of your trust." Sesshoumaru's voice lowered as he spoke at last, "I do not want you to be afraid."

"But I already am."

"What have I done to make you fear me?"

For the first time since she'dmet him, Rin heard an unexpected note in his voice. It was hurt_ - _she was sure of it. Against everything she had expected, a tiny bud that she had kept cloistered in her heart began to open, and she looked up at him and _looked_. He still stood stiffly in front of her, with his eyes cloistered from all emotion, but anchored on her all the same. And yet she knew he was being worn down. It was not defeat she sensed, but maybe resignation, or acceptance of the course of their conversation. She swallowed, carefully choosing her next words as she reached out to take his hand back into her own.

"Sesshoumaru-san," she tried. "I heard what Jaken said about your brother dying. And… there's the fact that you and Jaken won't tell me anything, or let me meet anyone. It's weird. And when I saw your reflection, just now… I knew… I know it's not… natural."

Sesshoumaru's hand on her own tightened.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know."

Sesshoumaru's other hand came up and reached beneath the crisp white lapel of his shirt. After a moment, he withdrew within his fingers a a burnished silver chain with a perfectly spherical blood-drop ruby.

"What is that?" she asked.

Sesshoumaru answered by holding the jewel up so it reflected the light of the moon on its surface. She stared, entranced. She had never seen such a beautiful stone up close, and the mystery attached to it, no, even the _neck _to which it was attached, made it all the more entrancing. The ruby didn't sparkle in the light, like diamonds did in advertisements and movies, but rather seemed to suck in the shadows around it.

"It is the Mask Stone."

"The Mask Stone. It has a name, then? Is it an heirloom?"

"No. But it is mine."

"Then why…" _Why are you showing it to me now, _she meant to say, but Sesshoumaru cut her off, like a hand plunging into the current of a stream.

"Would you rather be afraid of what you do not know, or what you do?" he asked abruptly.

Rin was at first confused by the unexpected question, then afraid by the turn in his mood. She answered with hesitance, her eyes trained on the dangling stone.

"I guess it depends on what we're talking about," she said.

"You asked to know who I am."

"I did."

"Then have your choice."

All at once, the sense of power that had choked her at the dinner table several nights before swept into the bamboo clearing. It entered as swiftly as her heart pumped blood. It felt like a warning flare, shot out into the night, and the physical impression of fear made Rin's heart clamor inside of her chest.

She met Sesshoumaru's eyes. They were like the jewel held between his fingers, dark and impenetrable. She did not find safety there. But she refused to look away past the glinting surface until she realized something else that was more significant: she could see a slight turn to his brow, just so. It was the same one that she had seen when, for a split second, he had been hurt by her declaration of fear.

It struck her at last that he had only ever wanted to have her trust. Rin felt herself grow firm; her decision was easy now. She would give her trust to him.

"I want to know who you are," she said, sucking in a breath of air. She felt dizzy. On a sudden whim, she added, "I want to know who _we_ are."

Her eyes lifted, and attached themselves to her guardian's.

"Then I will grant your request," he replied. Rin could barely hold onto his image without being overcome with the need to look away. He was solemn, resigned, and tall with power. He seemed to radiate, glowing from the inside; even from his very eyes. But she grit her teeth. She would trust him. She would _trust _him.

He moved closer to her. The jewel dangled between them like a heart shared between their bodies. She thought for a moment that he was going to pull her to him, to trap their hearts together, but instead it twisted around to cover her mouth.

"Do not scream."

Rin couldn't have even if she'd wanted to. Her mind was rocking in terrible anticipation, her heart was straining to give her body up, and her eyes were locked in a stare with Sesshoumaru that begged her trust**,** but gave no words or explanation.

She had no time to question what was happening. She could only watch the swift motion of Sesshoumaru drawing the necklace over his head.

And then the clearing was consumed with power bright enough to light a city sky. It was bright enough to fool her eyes into confusing light with shadow. It was dark enough to change her guardian from a man into a thing unknown.

.


	9. Chapter 9

A Jaken-centric chapter. Not much happens, but there's lots, and lots, of reveals… finally! Hope you enjoy.

.

bird on a wire

.

chapter nine

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**_March 25, 2006_**  
><em>Evening<em>

_Rin_

Sesshoumaru's hand remained firmly clasped against her mouth. His nails had grown long and hard, and pricked into her skin where they protruded from the ends of his long-fingered claws. Not fingers with nails, but _claws -_ something that was not human. That was all Rin could think as her senses overwhelmed her - _Not human, not human._

She screamed. To her terror, hardly any sound escaped through the tight seal of his hand. She shut her eyes tight, refusing to process anything but her need to escape. She tried to buck away, to pry Sesshoumaru off so she could run, but his hand was solid as stone, gripping her face with the strength of iron clamps, holding her down. This gentle imprisonment only made her thrash more wildly; she beat against his chest; she stomped at his feet with all her strength, barely keeping her balance even as her head remained in place. Another one of his hands came up and took her by the arm.

"Listen," Sesshoumaru demanded, not raising his voice. "_Listen to me._"

When Rin continued squirming, he tightened his grip, stalling her in his hands.

"Let go of me!" she tried to say, but her voice came out hopelessly muffled. Tears pricked at her eyes, preparing to resume as if they hadn't ceased mere minutes before.

"Stop this."

"No."

"Rin…" The syllables that composed her name rolled out above her, thrown out like bait on a line, but it was too heavy to tantalize her. His voice sounded more primal, lower than it ever had before. It was like the rumble of a summer storm. "I will explain if you give me time. Stop panicking."

"No, no," she said into his palm. She tried to push him away with her free arm.

"_Rin."_

He removed the seal on her mouth to lift her chin, forcing her to look at his face; she squeezed her eyes shut to block him out. From the split second before she had, however, she could see that his face seemed to have been glowing dimly in the moonlight. Faces weren't supposed to glow; not human faces. _Not human, not human._

"I haven't hurt you before. I will not do so now. Don't look away from me. You know me."

"No, I don't know you," Rin said with effort. "You lied to me. You… You… You're…"

"You know what I am."

Rin kept her eyes lowered. She had nowhere to look but at the edge of his hand, which was now only lightly grazing her chin. In the corner of her eye, she saw the stripes of blue beneath the skin running from his forearm up to the back of his palm. And then it struck her from a distant place,

_Yes, I do. I do know this touch._

The moment, and the clearing, vanished in an instant. But Sesshoumaru did not. She could feel him, close to her even though he was out of sight. A constant presence that she sought. Her protector. Her life-giver.

And then she felt herself running through a field. She was making a path through the tall tangles of miscanthus, her arms beating back the reeds that stretched above her head and supplicated the deep-drop sky. Little feather heads of the grass waved her goodbye as she pushed her way through. The sweeping arm of the sun rested on the back of her head, warming every strand straight to her scalp. She was small but light, and imbued with simple purpose. Like a bird in migration, flying to an ever-moving nest. But to her own.

_I know this touch._

The compass sense, that bone-driven directionality that was lodged inside the head of a bird, or a determined little girl, had imprinted upon Rin. She could not escape the inexplicably certainty that Sesshoumaru, and only he, could orient her; that he controlled the arrow of the small device that seemed as indelibly a part of her heart as it did of her mind. Fears forgotten, she opened her eyes, and looked into his.

The color of his irises were unalterably inhuman. Each one was radiant like sun flares seen behind tinted windows. It physically hurt her to look upon him directly. But, like with the brightness of the sun, her body adjusted. And Rin began to see what she could not before: as if for the first time, she could sense in his eyes the depths of his feelings, even though she could not tell what those feelings were.

His hand slipped away from her face. Rin knew she could have stepped back, and run from him then, but the urge had vanished, as if it had come from a dream. He wasn't hiding behind his body like it was a wall anymore, either. The mood in the clearing changed abruptly.

Something had happened. Rin felt suddenly, completely polarized within herself, as surely as Sesshoumaru had split himself into two identities, of a man and a beast. What had she just seen, in her mind? she wondered. What was she seeing before her? Were there any answers that anyone could give her?

She only knew that she would trust him, as she had promised. In this, at least, her mind and her heart were in agreement. She pressed her lips together, hoping her voice wouldn't fail.

"Who are you?" she whispered to him. "Who are you really?"

"I am Sesshoumaru," he answered.

"I know that. But, I'm asking, who are _you_? You're not a human." Moon-silver hair fell into his face even as she spoke the words, and Rin couldn't decide whether she wanted to pull it back to stare at him or to make him shroud himself more fully. "Are you youkai?"

"Yes."

"So that's why Jaken-san took Sota's book from me," Rin remarked. "He thought I'd figure out what you are if I kept reading it long enough."

"That was one reason."

"Is your name even really Sesshoumaru?"

The slightest widening of Sesshoumaru's eyes betrayed his surprise before her. "I _am_ the Lord Sesshoumaru of the Western Lands," he said, lacing his tone with arrogance. "I took this title from my father Inutaisho, upon his death, as his eldest and now his only surviving son."

Rin couldn't flatter him that she had ever heard of the title "Lord of the Western Lands." She knew the name Inutaisho, of course, but she had always thought it was her family's surname, not the given name of her adopted grandfather. Who wouldn't have been human as well, she realized anew.

Changing the subject, she asked, "Does that mean that all your family… they're all dead? What about Inuyasha?" Rin found herself asking. "Your half-brother?"

"He died four centuries ago." Sesshoumaru's jaw tightened. "Not so recently, or as violently, as you may have been led to believe, considering Jaken's poor timing in bringing up his name at dinner several nights ago."

"But… that would mean you're even older than Inuyasha was. Older than four centuries…"

"I have lived for nearly eight hundred years."

"You don't look like it, though," Rin said before she could stop herself.

The eyebrow Sesshoumaru raised at the comment caused a flood of warmth to swell in Rin's cheeks. "You don't," she repeated, her voice softened by embarrassment. He could have passed for someone only a few years older than Sota, except for the fact that he was anything but a mere 'someone' now. He was so beautiful that focusing on his features caused a reaction approaching physical pain. He reflected the beauty of the world around himself as much as he radiated an austere beauty from within himself; like the ruby he had worn concealed around his neck, he now flashed as he picked up light on his many facets.

"It is part of the Mask Stone's enchantment to hide my appearance in this matter as well. A youkai ages more slowly than a human," he explained.

The necklace was still clasped in one of Sesshoumaru's fists, the tiny links in the chain twisting as they dangled disarmingly from a crack between his claws.

"The disguise makes me all but indistinguishable to humans. The core is filled with spiritual power to dampen my youki. Surely you can see why I must hide myself to most humans." His pointed look made it clear that he included her in this number.

Ashamed, but not sure why, Rin fought to defend herself. "I was not afraid of you."

He snorted. "'Was?' You still smell of fear. I hear the flutter of your heart as if it were against my human ear."

"I mean, I was afraid at first. I was just… I was surprised, but then I…" _Remembered you_, she was on the edge of saying, before she stopped herself. She had no idea why she would say that since she had never seen Sesshoumaru like this before. There was nothing to remember. She pushed the idea out of her mind.

"Humans cannot help being afraid of youkai. It's pheromonal. Humans can recognize in them a strength, a natural advantage that they do not have, and not understanding it, they grow wary and angry. Youkai loathe the scent of humans in turn, though for different reasons.

"It was not always this way," Sesshoumaru interrupted her troubled thoughts, for which she was grateful. "In the past, humans and youkai did interact with each other. There was often discord, but occasionally understandings were reached. This Sesshoumaru himself reigned over both youkai and humans, possessing both the power to destroy life and to resurrect it."

"And now you… you stepped down from that position. You just own one of the biggest companies in Japan," said Rin, mystified. When Sesshoumaru had said the word 'power' she had immediately found herself agreeing. Her guardian wielded power like it was a sword.

"It's an accomplishment; yes. But my greatest achievement at present is that I remain."

Rin didn't understand. However, she let a small "oh" escape from her lips as if it could hide her sense of being overwhelmed.

"What is it?"

"I just wish you'd told me. At the beginning."

"I did not think you would want to know."

"Can you let me be the one to decide that from now on? I'm not a child."

"You will always be a child to me."

She couldn't find words to express the complicated, convoluted thoughts that trailed through her brain. God, Sesshoumaru was centuries old… It seemed impossible. Completely impossible, yet so much so that she simply had to believe it.

"Could you give me your hand again?" she asked him.

Sesshoumaru appeared confused - if his silence was any indication - but he granted her request. He brought up his hand, placing his palm upward. The supplication in the gesture, after the weighty revelation of his identity, embarrassed Rin a fair deal. She seized onto his wrist, tugging the hand toward herself.

Rin was grateful. She needed something to hold onto, and she too eagerly grasped at the tactile proof of his presence. Of his true presence. She turned his hand over, attempting to understand it, but the touch of his skin left her even more awe-struck than his words. Even as she encased the small piece of his body between her palms, it captivated her. More than it had been in his human shape, his hands, his fingers were longer and leaner. But he was warm. Warm with blood pulsing underneath it, red blood, red blood that could spill and be spilt. She pressed her skin against his own, seeing how her smaller hand fell into his, and calmed.

She dared to look up at him again. He was still painfully bright, perhaps more so because of the night sky. His amber eyes were on her, waiting for her response. Even through her fear, she squeezed his hand lightly in reassurance.

_I know this touch, _she thought again_._

"Thank you," she said, quieted. "Thank you for showing me who you are."

Sesshoumaru's reticence was a quiet acceptance of her words. His expression did not change, but when his hand squeezed Rin's in return, she felt both relieved and suddenly exhausted.

"Let's go back," she suggested. Sesshoumaru agreed. He returned the necklace to its place around his neck, and after the transformation was complete, they took the rest of their stroll in silence.

_._

_**Same evening**  
>Jaken<em>

Jaken had been waiting on a low seat when, without forewarning, the door swung open. Rin all but stumbled into the apartment, pale and rumpled as a white sheet of laundry waving in the wind. Jaken jumped up, alarmed. He was still intent not to show it in his face, however.

"Welcome home!" he trumpeted, more vigorously than usual. Rin took no notice. She slid off her shoes dispassionately in the entry, only answering in the perfunctory greeting.

Sesshoumaru walked in behind her, taking Jaken's attention off of the puzzle of her behavior as he rushed to collect his Lord's shoes.

"Welcome home!" he repeated, eyes darting from Sesshoumaru's chest to the girl's downcast face. His lord appeared no worse for the wear, though somewhat resigned in his mood. Jaken wondered what had occurred on the walk, but he didn't dare query, or even to make eye contact with his Lord.

Rin had no such claims on him, however. She was always the one to break into his personal space. As he brushed past her, and caught her eye, he could finally sense her weak human aura. To his surprise, there seemed to be more peace in her spirit than there had been for days.

"I'm going to my room," she announced as soon as she reached thecarpet. "Goodnight, Jaken. And… Sesshoumaru-sama."

"…Yes?" Sesshoumaru answered.

"Thank you."

As Rin turned away, Jaken caught his lord opening his mouth as if he were going to say more, but was unable to, or had stopped himself midway. He shut his mouth again and stared at the wall from behind which lay the small hallway and her rooms. Jaken stared in turn at his master, horrified. Over the course of the centuries that he had followed Sesshoumaru, Jaken had never seen him so discomfited. _Never._

"My lord…" began Jaken, extremely concerned, but Sesshoumaru brushed him aside, tossing a necklace onto the couch. It settled behind a throw pillow, which he stared at with an expression that Jaken could not interpret.

"Sesshoumaru-sama."

Jaken stilled, confused. The softly-spoken words had come from Sesshoumaru himself. But why would he say that of himself? He recounted their prior conversation, and stopped at Rin's salutations. That was it! The girl had called him 'Sesshoumaru-sama.' Jaken's shock doubled what it had already been. Rin hadn't done that once, ever since they had found her months ago.

"My lord, I see you have come to the same conclusion as your humble servant, that - Ahhh!" Jaken was taken aback to look at Sesshoumaru standing in front of him in his humanoid youkai form. The color of his hair changed from root to tip, so it appeared that angel floss was brushing against the shoulders of his black suit. His fingers had elongated, and he was flexing them disinterestedly in perusal, as if there was grit beneath his nails he couldn't be bothered to remove but still couldn't totally ignore. The mood the house itself had changed from stifled refinement and structure to a darker, but more vital and pure elegance. The cry of the swords on the wall several rooms away had becomeless like a hum and more like an insistent whine. _Bear us, bear us. _They were all but weeping with want. The house pulsed with a sudden whirl of desires.

Or perhaps that was just the cumulation of shock that had made him dizzy from lack of oxygen. Jaken tugged at his neck, struggling to clear his airway.

"Sesshoumaru-sama!" he gasped. "Why did you take off the Mask Stone? I thought you said that we couldn't do so! In case the human girl was to wake up and..."

"She has already seen," said the greater demon, his voice distant. "Is that not obvious?"

"Seen! Seen! And you allowed it!" Jaken received a vague nod. He took in more air, nearly choking on it before he continued, "So, she must have come to realize-! And this is why she was so busy with the books… the studying… her asking about your family…All along, she…"

"She has seen me," Sesshoumaru affirmed with finality. "You will no longer need to hide yourself around her." He shed his jacket and dumping it into Jaken's arms (and one sleeve, at least, onto his head). "Take care of these. I will be working in the study, and do not wish to be disturbed."

"Y-yes, my lord."

Sesshoumaru left the room.

The quiet of the room returned, leaking in from the corners and spreading out like a film. The newly imparted silence only increased the volume of Jaken's thoughts as they tumbled around inside of him, crashing against rocks, tumbling through rapids. Rin had seen, and she had called their lord by his name. Surely… surely this meant that she knew her past?

And yet she had not acted _so _differently. Jaken felt utterly lost, as he stood at the foot of the entryway, feeling wedged between two people and at the same time very far from both of them. The world felt like it was miles below his feet. He was as good as hanging in the air, all but at the edge of falling.

Jaken returned to his recliner, making no attempt to mask the trembling in his hands. He turned on the TV.

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_**March 26, 2006**  
>Morning<em>

"Well, tell me. Are there many of you left? Is there some big, secret world I don't know about? Like in Harry Potter or something?"

Sesshoumaru, Rin, and Jaken sat together at the breakfast table against the window. The morning was pretty enough, with a clear, light blue sky that stretched as far as their eyes would allow them to see through the glass panes. Jaken had barely finished pouring the weakened green tea into each of their cups when Rin broke her silence. Seeing as it had been her first glance at his youkai form that had caused her to go quiet that morning, Jaken felt a bit of pressure leave his shoulders. It wasn't on his own behalf, though, of course not - he was simply relieved that his lord would have no reason to become angry with him.

"There are maybe one hundred youkai in all of Japan that I know of… Hardly enough to constitute a 'secret world.' That aside, there are many weak-blooded hanyou with such diluted strains that they possess no youki whatsoever," Sesshoumaru answered Rin.

"Then how do you know that they aren't human?"

"Because a person may still be unusual in different ways," put in Jaken eagerly, allowing his lord to pick at the fruit on his plate. "They may possess inexplicable attractions to certain elements, or connections to the natural, or extraordinarily long lifespans. Occasionally they may have variations in their appearance, in their eye or hair color."

"So what you're telling me is that you and Sesshoumaru, have those abilities, too, but to a greater degree."

"We do," Jaken affirmed, biting back an insult.

"So that's how you're so old."

Jaken spluttered. "How dare you call me old, you wench!"

Although he said nothing, Sesshoumaru appeared amused.

"What?" Rin wrinkled her nose. You're covered in age spots, Jaken! You look way older than Sesshoumaru. And you're the ugliest shade of green I've ever seen. The only way you could have lived this long is because you're a youkai."

"I have lived one thousand, nine hundred and thirty-seven years," Jaken defended himself. "You, as a human, couldn't even hope to look as well as I do at this age! And you should know that among the greatest youkai, I haven't met a single one who died from natural causes. And I am perfectly middle-aged! Three thousand years is generally seen to be approaching a veteran age, which isn't even elderly; the father of our lord was somewhere in that range when he was killed. But it is difficult to say…"

"He was killed?" Rin exclaimed, her chopsticks clattering onto her plate. She looked more pale than the comment deserved.

"Yes. The world was different then. We were all constantly at war with each other," said Sesshoumaru, pushing back his chair. He wiped his mouth with his white napkin, then dropped it onto his chair. "Jaken, speak to her."

He got up and left the room without another word.

Jaken assumed that his lord was simply going to get his briefcase and jacket, but he caught Rin's worried expression and perceived that she was blaming herself for his sudden exit. Sesshoumaru was hardlysensitive about his father's death, these days, but Rin didn't know that. Seeing an opportunity to mock her, he sneered, and said: "Have you never even heard of the warring statesperiod? And the feudal society before that? It was constant war, you stupid girl. You should read some history."

"I _do _study history," Rin retorted. "But it doesn't say anything about youkai actually being real, so excuse me for being ignorant."

"You are excused," Jaken deadpanned.

"But, seriously," Rin tapped her fingers on the table a few times. "If that's what happened to Sesshoumaru's father, what about his mother? Was she… was she murdered as well?"

This, being more recent, gave Jaken pause. "After a fashion," he said, unwilling to disclose more.

"It all sounds so violent." Rin shuddered. She was no longer eating, but using her chopsticks to slide food around her plate.

"It is not a mere question of violence. What you should be asking _is_ why the youkai, who can live to be over three thousand years old, have dwindled so drastically in just the past two hundred years."

"But I don't know anything about that. I didn't even know youkai were real until last night." Rin set down her tea on the table, and gently took to pushing it off the edge of her placemat with the edge of her fingernail. "I suppose you want me to ask why they're gone."

"No. I want you to ask why Sesshoumaru and myself are not." Jaken watched her face closely. "I'll spare you the difficulty of thinking, seeing as you are so stupid, and simply answer your question. Lord Sesshoumaru was smarter than the other youkai, and stronger, too, but he had other advantages."

"Like his disguise," Rin realized, her eyes lighting up.

"Yes." Sesshoumaru emerged in the kitchen doorway. He had his jacket under his arm, apparently ready for work - except that he still had not put on his disguise, a return to an earlier pattern before Rin had returned to their lives. Only allowing a short delay for this reverie, Jaken jumped up from his seat and scrambled to leave the room, leaving Rin behind with the leftovers of their breakfast.

Sesshoumaru was waiting for him in the genkan, looking unconcerned as he scrolled through messages on his handheld phone. Jaken bent down to tie Sesshoumaru's laces on his black leather shoes, and coughed into his hand a few times, finding his throat unexpectedly filled with mucus.

"Are you well, Jaken?"

"Yes, my Lord," he simpered, and swallowed the phlegm.

Rin crossed into the room.

"When will you be back?" she asked, standing at the edge of the carpet and the entryway. "You'll make it for dinner, won't you, Sesshoumaru-sama?"

Jaken looped the strings together, tying Sesshoumaru's laces firmly, and wondered why the girl was asking such a banal question with a tone of such significance. After a moment, it struck him that she had been angry at their lord for several days, especially after discovering that Inuyasha was dead.

Sesshoumaru didn't answer immediately. He appeared to be sussing her out, and even Jaken felt inclined to hold his breath. At last, he nodded, and Jaken let out a sigh of relief as his lord said, "I will join you."

"Okay," answered Rin. She, too, was slightly breathless. "See you then."

Sesshoumaru made his way to the door, Rin following at his heels. "Jaken?" he said.

The frog demon proffered both the briefcase and jacket delicately before his master.

Sesshoumaru waited to receive them, first slipping his gold and ruby necklace over his head. He changed into a human caricature of himself. His lord's body shimmered in places where the disguise took hold, masking his identity, his potential and his eternal youth. Some of his beauty disappeared, too, as his shining hair became peppered with black and coarser from the root to the tip. As always, Jaken sighed in dismay. _To think it has come to this…_

Jaken passed over the items to his lord. They all said farewell to one another, and soon the door to the elevator shaft fell shut, taking Sesshoumaru away to work. Jaken turned around to leave, but he felt Rin pulling at his sleeve.

"What do you want?" he scowled at her over his shoulder.

Rin wasn't looking at him. Well, she _was_, but at his skin and not at his face. She appeared mildly disgusted, as if she were perceiving mold in the crack of a wall, or a pile of debris and trash at the edge of a pond.

"What do you want?" he repeated, shaking the girl's grip off of him.

"Oh, I just…" Rin looked embarrassed for a moment. "I wanted to know the rest of the story."

"What story?" Jaken feigned ignorance, but Rin wouldn't let him escape.

"You had to leave the kitchen before I was finished asking you my questions," she said. "I wasn't done asking you about Sesshoumaru-san and about youkai. I mean, what are you, anyway?"

"I am a _kappa_, obviously!" Jaken cringed. "What more could you possibly want to know besides what I've already told you?"

"A lot of things."

"The more I tell you, the more questions you seem to have," Jaken muttered, sullen.

"Then just answer this one. How, exactly, was Sesshoumaru-san smart enough to survive?"

Of course she would ask a question that could not be answered easily with accuracy!

"He possessed the necklace," said Jaken, drawing out the words with as much long-suffering as he could.

"Umm, how does owning a necklace prove he was smart?"

"It doesn't!" Jaken exclaimed. "But the way he managed to get ahold of the necklace, on the other hand, _was _clever, if you really want to know…"

"I do," said Rin, sitting down eagerly on the sofa across from his favored chair. "I want to know everything."

She stared at him, clearly expectant that her bullying would be successful.

Jaken remained standing, making it clear that he was not interested in settling down and speaking to her. Also, in his current form, he was significantly shorter than Rin, so this allowed him at least to look at her eye-to-eye.

"Telling you everything is an impossibility. It would take a full century to tell of the events of two."

"Then do your best with what time you have. Aya-sensei doesn't get here until this afternoon. We have at least a couple of hours, and I know you don't have anything to do but watch TV, right?"

Jaken's eyes glanced at the clock on the wall. He considered her request, and his schedule. She was right. He had nothing to do, except to answer his Lord's command.

_'Speak to her,' _he had said.

Even if he tried to twist it around, and pretend that Sesshoumaru had only meant 'keep her occupied at the breakfast table,' there was still little room to deviate from the order and remain loyal, as long as Rin kept persisting. It left him with no choice but to delve into the history that he had dammed up in his mind for years. Had the audience been different, he might have enjoyed doing it. But such was his life.

"I won't tell you this story a second time, so listen carefully," Jaken began, lacing his fingers together behind his back.

"I will," Rin affirmed, looking very smug.

He shuffled forward a few steps, dithering between sitting down and standing. His slippers collected tiny threads of static from the carpet as he moved, and settle in his feet. He chose to stand his ground.

"It's a very dark story," he warned her. "From a human perspective. It's filled with horror like you have never seen or known. I don't care what you say, or what you think you've seen, but if you haven't seen a man torn apart from his limbs, begging for that as a _mercy_, you don't know anything about what darkness is. I have seen it. I am a part of it. This is what it was like for the hundreds of years before the present, when youkai reigned, and humans were hardly superior to cattle in their intellect and ability to survive.

"Filthy, low creatures… and so were most of the youkai, or _oni_, as we called them. But we had something in common, at least: we all strived to remain close to the earth which had birthed us. We understood, then, something that has been forgotten. That we are all a part of the same circle of existence. Just like there are rings of hell, there are rings that make up what is living. Everything must travel back to the point where it began.

"Do you understand? In this life, as you know it to be 'natural,' things are born and things die, but for some of us, we do not simply die, but are killed. _This _is our natural way. Our lord's name means _circle of death_. He was born into violence for that is how his life _must _finish. If you truly want to know his story, you must know that it is not one of light, but of stretching darkness only interspersed with radiance."

Here, Jaken closed his introduction. Rin's pupils had become dilated and her breathing was slow as she sank back into the cushions on the sofa. Jaken allowed himself to briefly revel in pride for his craft, and how he had captivated her (as he always had - he had always been able to tell her stories and she would listen, and for once, be quiet for a while). He tasted the air. It was bitter and distant like memory. Then, he plunged into his tale.

_._


	10. Chapter 10

And here we go, another chapter uploaded and posted. Thanks as always goes out to my readers (and to you reviewers who spur me on, in both my fanfiction and life in general, frankly) and to my beta, Liz. You may know her on as LDP88. She has several excellent SessRin fanfic in progress, so go check them out after you're finished reading and (hopefully, _ahem_) reviewing Chapter 10! :) Ooh, it's very long. Have fun!

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bird on a wire

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chapter ten

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"I have not always traveled with Lord Sesshoumaru, so I cannot tell you all the details of his childhood," Jaken began. "As you know, my lord had a half-brother named Inuyasha, and he had a human mother. Inuyasha was weak and unintelligent, yet favored by my lord's father. He and my lord had a… poor relationship. But Inuyasha was, I'll simply say, _incapacitated _when I first came into my lord's service."

"How did you meet him?" asked Rin.

"Inuyasha?" Jaken scowled. "He was stuck to a tree."

"No, I mean Sesshoumaru-sama."

"Ah." Jaken could not keep the pleased tone from his voice as he eagerly stepped back from regaling Rin with Sesshoumaru's early history in favor of his own.

"We met over five centuries ago. I have been his vassal for just a fraction of my life; the majority of my millennia were lived among a tribe of kappa. I was of some prestige among them, even becoming their ruler. I was adored, you know; I sought to assimilate all of the tribes throughout the western lands. We became vast. We also were unable to defend ourselves, in the end, from the outsider peril. There had been a massive war… and our tribe had lost. Sesshoumaru-sama appeared unasked and unexpected, and rescued me from a youkai woman's claws, when I was merely seconds away from being her next meal. He rescued _all_ of us when we couldn't have deigned to have asked. His nobility, his magnificence brought tears to my eyes. I couldn't even look upon the glaring white linen of his clothes. I had to dedicate my life to him. It was the only way I could redeem my own life."

"Wait, are you serious?" Rin interjected. "Why didn't you just thank Sesshoumaru-sama and pledge the loyalty of you and all the other kappa? Why did you leave your people? "

Jaken couldn't immediately pinpoint the reason, much less who his people had been. Their images only floated in his mind with the duration of a dust mote in the corner of his life. For a moment, Jaken wondered if he had had a brother, with eyes like mud, and a mole on his left cheek. There was a thought of a peaceful stream, the quiet talking of its gathered companions composing the bubbling babble of the water. But that quickly faded into another rhythm, the stomping of marching feet, webbed and scaly, across the dusty plains, beating endlessly into the night. War. Death. His own.

"Oh, the debt of gratitude, Rin; how could you understand it? I had resigned myself to death, and in my mind I was already cut off from my own existence. When the great dog lord of the western lands rescued me on a whim - just as he did for you - Jaken the lord of the kappa remained dead. But I, I was born."

"I never would have guessed that…"

Rin continued the thought, but Jaken heard no more of it. Nothing she said could take importance over even the memory of what Sesshoumaru-sama had one on that bleak but noble night. "Realizing that Sesshoumaru-sama alone deserved to profit from this humble kappa's life, I made it my solemn goal to serve him from that day, no, that moment onward. I ran after him, not sparing a moment to grab any food or possessions. And so I began to follow.

"Our lord has always preferred to be alone, so I had to pursue his favor for some time, but in the end I convinced him to allow me to enter _into _his service. We have traveled together ever since. For many years, many years. Our lives…

"Youkai's lives used to be very predictable. That is to say, we came to expect unpredictable elements everyday. We were prepared for and engaged in constant rhythms of movement and turmoil. We never slept in buildings, you know; no one decent did in those days. Not even the humans. The few of them we saw moved around just like us for most of my life, chasing creatures and being chased. But eventually they settled down and began to farm. From the time that my lord and I traveled together, we did not immediately see that the growth of villages would lead to the growth of cities, to an upheaval of what being 'human' or 'youkai' even signified, but…"

Jaken shook his head. "…But the change happened all the same. During the latter half of the Edo period, I'd say - that's when the wars ended, and the human world began to shift in its balance, settling into a peace like I had never known could exist. Even the youkai ceased gathering and vying for position. Politics began taking place in words and trade more than in warfare. Before the greater youkai had even become aware of it, humans outnumbered them in size and overpowered most of them in terms of fighting strength. The humans possessed new guns, strong guns, that hit targets faster than a youkai could cross a field to attack. Many youkai fled. More youkai died. The greater ones dropped into the shadows, waiting for the currents of history to shift back to their favor. As it was, food was plenty and peace was abundant. There was little reason to protest the change when life could be continued largely the same as ever, though perhaps, as in Sesshoumaru-sama's case, with less freedom to travel. Forced to become sedentary, my lord grew restless. He never stopped watching the rapid changes of the world around us, of course, but he remained willfully impotent to change. And then one day, my lord stepped onto a train.

"I wasn't there. I couldn't disguise myself among human society with merely a hat and gloves, as Sesshoumaru did when he rarely ventured forth among them, to investigate their growth. And how they had grown within a handful of years! And how my lord changed within the course of a day. He returned to the eastern edge of the Musashino forest that night, appearing as if he had been shot by a purifying arrow, had been forced to disintegrate and yet had been pieced together again. Were he a lesser youkai, he would have seemed afraid. I had never even seen that expression on him when he was close to death in battle. But his were the eyes of a man who had seen death. It was in the air… It was on the train. And it was growing all around us.

"To be fair, from the first time I had seen the trains, among other ugly vehicles that the humans had designed, I was reminded of the lesser youkai of old, of those fast-moving creatures with foul intent… and the ability to harm. Both creature and machine were equally senseless and lacking in empathy. And so it was, on that day, that Sesshoumaru had seen a vision of the future; that humans would soon - if they hadn't already - discover a way to manufacture the greater youkai, in all their power but also in all their cruelty…"

"Go on," Rin interrupted, before Jaken even realized that he'd ceased speaking. He resumed, drawing his padded haori around himself as if it were a cocoon.

"I had come to the conclusion that a change was incumbent, but I was taken more off-guard than my Lord by how rapidly events streamed together and a new world was realized. But Sesshoumaru-sama was wise. He did not waste time after his fears about humanity were confirmed. I say confirmed because he already knew what was coming, beyond the reach of either hope or denial. He had been convinced that the entire youkai race would be lost to genocide, and had spent centuries making plans to ensure his survival."

Jaken stared at Rin's pale and anxious face. "What?" he barked. "What is it? Spit it out."

"You said the word, 'genocide,'" she whispered.

"They killed all of the, umm, youkai like Sesshoumaru-sama? That's terrible. Why would they do that?"

"It's a long story, which I'm _trying _to tell you."

"I just don't understand how that could have happened. If the youkai were as powerful as you…"

"It didn't happen all at once," said Jaken matter-of-factly. "They never do, as I understand it."

When had it begun? Not as soon as he had come to Sesshoumaru's side, no; not even the first time he had seen black smoke curling in the sky. He narrowed his eyes as images flashed before him. Not depictions of death, not _yet_, of course, but of all matter of scenes from five centuries before.

Perhaps the world had always been destined to fall apart. He could remember the first time he was confronted with evidence of the youkai's demise. It was the picture of death within a death - the scene of a grave, and a human girl who stood inside of a sun-bleached skeleton, trembling as she struggled to hold up a rusty blade. She was trying to protect herself with a power she didn't know the first thing about. She had looked about the same age as Rin did now, come to think of it.

"Why were the youkai killed, Jaken?"

"Fear. Jealousy, too. But most of all, misunderstanding. The humans forgot their place in the world. They confused themselves with the monsters, declaring that our thirst for blood made us blemishes on a perfect society. But they said this while still fighting wars amongst themselves, and not even for food. They destroyed the land, which youkai _protected_, and by walking upon, gave life to. Humans are still just as stupid, even now. Destroying. Destroying. Their lives are so short, they don't even value the time that they have. You humans are idiots."

"Not all of us."

Jaken glared at her. "If you interrupt again, I'm not going to finish."

Rin clapped her mouth shut.

Pleased, Jaken returned to his earlier stream of thought, wading into those flowing memories with careful steps. "In spite of the general stupidity of humans, the fact of the matter is that my lord owed much to that strange girl I mentioned before… The one who later became Inuyasha's wife."

"Inuyasha's wife? Don't you mean Kagome Higurashi?" Jaken waited as Rin processed the information, and then stiffened. She had obviously come to the only possible conclusion.

"Jaken! That's impossible! Unless…"

"Unless she was a time traveler," Jaken confirmed, satisfied with the havoc he had wrought upon his listener.

"How could that be?" Rin exclaimed, her eyes boggling. "How did she do it? Does she have a time machine?"

"What? I don't know, I-"

"And is it at the Higurashi shrine? Maybe that's why it's so big. Jaken, are all of the Higurashi's time travelers?_!_"

"No!" Jaken shouted. "They're not, and I don't know how she did it! For all I know, she fell into a time machine by accident. I never asked! There was always something more important to talk about. Now don't get any ideas into your head, either. That wench is the only human or youkai I've ever heard of time traveling before. And the past wasn't very good to humans."

"I wouldn't go back that far," Rin said, her eyes momentarily focusing on something Jaken couldn't see. "Just a few months or so."

"Snap out of it," Jaken said harshly. "I only think it's possible that she fell through time because she was a miko, and you don't have a trace of spiritual energy in you at all. Just a weak and boring human girl. Now as I was saying before you interrupted, when Inuyasha's wife - widow, by then - lay on her deathbed, she gave my lord her final blessing, and revealed her entire history to him, and warned him about the future."

"So she went back to the past, and stayed there forever?"

Jaken nearly gave up right then. "Why are you still hung up on this?" he wailed. "It's not _that _shocking. Even when I first encountered her, and realized where she was from, I didn't let it shock me into stupidity!"

"Of course you didn't," Rin's tone was too cool to be sincere. "You were well aware that people could time travel, when as far as you knew, it had never happened before."

"I'll have you know that a single _look_ at her made it obvious that she was out of place! She wore one of those… one of those… school things!"

"A sailor suit?" Rin returned to being incredulous.

"Yes! One of those!" Jaken nearly howled with delight at Rin's validating disbelief in what he still believed to be one of the greatest scandals in history. "The girl wore that ridiculous school uniform in the middle of the warring states period! I couldn't tell if she was a prostitute or an invalid with the way sheran around with her legs uncovered all the time."

"I guess no one else did that, huh?"

In retrospect, some youkai clans had gone topless, but they were oni. True youkai always wore garments that covered themselves respectably. It was a matter of course.

"Kagome didn't wear it all her life, though, did she?" asked Rin.

"No, no. She eventually learned to wear a kimono, I suppose; yes - she was in a summer kimono when she laid dying and spoke to my lord. Sesshoumaru-sama was as convinced of her story as I was, when he heard it.

"His reasoning was, as I remember, that even complete strangers to our land were not foolish enough to ignore youkai or refuse to recognize a demon on sight. During the Warring States era, as I believe it's known today, they were still quite… frequent. And humans were invariably aware of their comparative weakness, and were afraid. All the same, that time-traveling girl never even batted an eyelash at my presence, much less at my _lord's, _a far more dire offense that almost always leads to death. I had met the girl only a few weeks after she had arrived, apparently, from the future, and even for a human she had been incredibly naive and foolish, speaking back to our Lord and shrieking in constant surprise at his prowess in battle."

Yes, this was definitely how it had happened. He could vividly remember her bursting with nearly-worshipful praise of Sesshoumaru even now, her eyes passionate, her arms waving around in her exuberance, though she claimed loyalty to the weak hanyou for reasons that Jaken could not quite recall.

"In any case, although the miko claimed she did not know the details of the youkai's extinction, my lord and I did not for a second suspect that youkai could die off by mere disease, or even hide themselves from humans without error. There were still too many of them in my time for this to be possible, and too many of them who were weak. My lord concluded thus that the youkai would have to be wiped out by unnatural causes in our future, and from that time on he began to make preparations to ensure he would not be among their number. And, of course, myself."

"When did it happen?"

"I'm getting to that," Jaken flared up for the second time to hear Rin's interjection, "Stop being so impatient and listen! Don't you know how hard this is to discuss? How easy it is to lose my place? I have hundreds of years of memories, where you have but a trickle, a mere drop where my brain holds rivers! Do not allow me to be swept away in the current! Do not allow it! Do not-"

"Jaken, I'm sorry!" the girl pleaded, but Jaken could only see, for a moment, all the trailing thoughts in his mind, swirling around in whirlpools and crashing against banks. "Just keep going, I didn't mean to upset you. Really. Tell me about the preparations."

"Preparations?" Jaken put his hand out, feeling for his recliner. His claws found the sturdy back of the chair, and leaned against it, letting it steady him for a moment. "Oh… Yes… The preparations for our survival."

He took in a deep breath, finding his place. "My lord didn't immediately begin planning until very late. Only once he felt that the emergency was immediate. Keep in mind that change used to be much more gradual, then.

"But time suddenly fell in upon itself, compounding. It was as if the world had always been one way, and then when I awoke the next morning, the Edo period was ending and the greater youkai, once so proud, were rarely willing to show their face in the public arenas of humans. Humans no longer feared them, nor did they understand them, and with their weapons this often offered a certain challenge that most youkai were increasingly unwilling to fight against. Those who went against humans on their own quickly found themselves pursued and overpowered.

"Sesshoumaru knew that being known, and seen as a youkai, was becoming dangerous, and decided that he would have to withdraw his mantle as the youkai Lord of the Western Lands, and go into hiding. But this option seemed inviolable long-term. It is… It was strange that Sesshoumaru-sama's half-human brother came to our aid so long after his death, especially as he had been the spur in my Lord's heel since his birth. But it was his inherited disadvantage that had caused him to make unusual friends who loyally served my Lord for his sake. Don't look at me like that, you dumb girl, I'm speaking of the Higurashi family. The family of his dead wife. They remembered us, through shrine records and legends passed down from generation to generation. And so my Lord was able to reconcile with them, and make an agreement. In exchange for his protection, they invented for him a flawless disguise, using a combination of illusions and pure spiritual energy. Once he possessed his own 'mask,' he began to auction off this service to other youkai. The riches he collected from this venture formed the true foundation of his second empire. The Inutaisho Corporation, naturally, after his father.

"The _first_ business empire, I suppose I should mentioned that one as well, had begun early in the Meiji period. Sesshoumaru-sama had decided to," Jaken shuddered, "begin interacting with the human marketplace, in hopes to secure his position of power should the situation arise that ancient claims to inheritances and property would be void in the new system (and of course, they were; do you see how clever our lord is?). After the first world war, in which Japan did not have a major role, as you know, Lord Sesshoumaru left me with the reigns to the business, took on a _new _disguise and sought out a formal, human education, if only to give authenticity to his new persona. He deigned to create a false family tree for himself while traveling abroad."

"A family tree? Does that mean Sesshoumaru-san's _married_?" Rin interjected, her voice approaching horrified.

Jaken gaped. "What? No! What part of false don't you understand?"

"I just…. Well, you said _family tree_, and it's true that Sesshoumaru-san's been alive for a long time. So it would make sense, wouldn't it, that he'd… at one point…" Rin furrowed her brow, and asked with surprising hesitance, "Is he widowed, then? Or engaged?"

Jaken couldn't even imagine it. "Absolutely not. I refuse to answer another question about it. And you should never ask him about it, either," he tacked on the last bit belatedly.

"I see," Rin replied. She was, judging from her expression, only partially satisfied on the matter. "But tell me more about Europe. I'd heard that Sesshoumaru-san was part english and I wanted to know -"

Jaken guffawed. "Lord Sesshoumaru a _harufu(1)?_ Hardly!"

"But Aya-sensei said…"

"My lord's father, a _Japanese_ _youkai_ named Inutaisho died centuries and centuries ago. His mother passed on more recently, but she never left the mainland once in her lifetime, so it's safe to say that she was Japanese to the core. Though I do believe my lord's father did go to China at one point. But until the first world war, as I was saying before you _interrupted me_, Sesshoumaru-sama had never been abroad.

"The gap in my lord's knowledge concerning foreign lands never concerned me, nor him. But it was at his mother's urging and manipulation that he embarked on a ship aimed for the European continent. The trip extended itself when his disguise faltered, as he was too far away from the shrine where he regularly received re-installments of spiritual energy into his necklace. He struggled to find ways to keep himself from being revealed as non-human, and in that course, interacted with many creatures of pagan myth and legend in his journeys. Before long, of course, the second war began, and it became impossible for him to return home.

"I hid in the high forests of Musashino, struggling to protect my lord's treasure while his business empire was systematically destroyed in fire bombs and looting along with everything else in Edo. Though I suppose it was already 'Tokyo' by then, wasn't it? Meanwhile, my lord's mother was far away in Kyushu. She had chosen to remain in the lands of her late and unfaithful husband, my father the Lord Inutaisho. She survived the air raids, and was able to - perhaps unscrupulously - keep more well-fed than many humans had done during those scarce times. But there are some attacks from which even youkai cannot heal.

"The humans, as I had always feared, found a way to harness the powers of the greatest youkai, and used them to drop hell upon each other. There was no warning; no way to prepare, I believe… and I had to entreat Sesshoumaru to return home at the end of the war, for his mother's funeral. She had died from radiation poisoning within the year. He did not get to say goodbye. However, I was able to in his stead. She told me with a bitter smile that her death had become a relief. She did not find it as easy to interact with the human world as I did. She had no desire to stay on, and mocked her son to the last for living.

"When my lord Sesshoumaru returned from his sojourn, I had to explain to him that most of whom we had known had passed on. But they had not all died as collateral damage from bombs or flames.

"I have heard that they do not teach much about the second war in text-books. I assume that they do not explain why so many died, to the point that nearly half of the young and middle-aged human men in the country perished. The truth is not what you would think. It is part of the circle. The one that extends around all of us youkai. The circle of death.

"There were many battles being waged during that decade and a half of war, but not all of them took place outside of our country's shores. The last of the youkai _had_ to be extinguished - this was the militant government's chief aim, no matter what propaganda they proposed. As far as the humans were concerned, the idea had logical merit in the great scheme of international power. Equal parlay with other nations could not be achieved by the humans in Japan as long as a stronger species threatened to interfere with their political and economic structures. In other words, youkai had to be subjugated. They were forced to submit or die. But submission also meant death.

"During the rebuilding era, Lord Sesshoumaru, too, fought his own battle to regain his lands and to keep his power, if only ideologically. In the new company he built, he has already once pretended to be his own son in order to 'take over' the company from himself nearly twenty years ago. Being supposedly half-foreign makes it hard to track his family line, and also explains away his appearance, which looks less _Japanese _than he does without his disguise. Surely you noticed that Sesshoumaru-sama has a striking presence, haven't you? What you are looking at is the land itself. Sesshoumaru-sama is one of the last great youkai. He looks more like this land than the humans who live in it. He is one of the last true people of the land. I, too, am one. Shippou, who resides at the Higurashi residence, is one more."

Jaken finished here, finding he suddenly had nothing left to say. His hand was trembling as it rested on the top of the chair, and seeing this, he snatched it back. It left a damp spot behind on the leather, as if he had sweated out the rivers of his mind and left the scar on the furniture itself.

"Jaken, I'm overwhelmed," said Rin. She was rubbing at her face; massaging it, as far as he could tell. Her skin distorted where her palms stretched the skin of her face, shrinking her eyes, elongating her nose, and so on, again and again. "You told me so much more than I thought there would be to his past. To all of your pasts."

"That wasn't his past, Rin, but nearly a _portion _of my lord's life," Jaken returned. It was a selective portion, too; not only excluding Rin but the time when Sesshoumaru had hated humans with violent passion. But this was not relevant to Rin understanding Sesshoumaru at present, and was therefore irrelevant. He knew instinctively that his master would not be pleased with him for sharing even this much.

"It's a lot to process. It's an entire history of a world I didn't know was there."

"It's not your fault," Jaken acknowledged grudgingly. "It's not there anymore."

Rin's hands moved to rub at her arms up and down, as if she were fighting off chills. Jaken felt a draft as well, in spite of the extra layer he had put on that morning.

"I don't really understand it all," she said, her voice quieter now. "But I'm glad you told me. I wonder, though, why Sesshoumaru wouldn't just have explained everything to me himself."

"He's very private."

"I know that he's… reserved, but if he was _that _private, he would be angry at you for telling me all this," Rin reasoned. "Why would he have you do it instead? Does it really bother him to talk about his past?"

Jaken sighed. "I think, Rin, that he does not mind you knowing, but he simply would not say it. Until recently, and perhaps even now, our lord has felt he was alone."

.

_**March 29, 2006  
><strong>Rin_

"How's the essay coming?"

"Slowly," Rin muttered as she reached for her eraser yet again. It had been three days since her lor- _guardian_ Sesshoumaru had revealed his true form to her, and in spite of the fact that she was living with non-human beings, life was starting to feel normal. She was no longer surprised to see a man with white hair appear behind her as if out of thin air (he was so quiet, so subtle). She still found Jaken a little strange, a little moody, and even shorter than she remembered. Being that she was no pillar of height herself, his height had recently become the focus of much fond teasing.

All in all, she had found little dramatic change in her life since the incident, with a single caveat: her heart was lighter, and more confident in Sesshoumaru than it had been before. To see him demonstrating trust in her made it just that much easier to trust him as she longed to. No longer did it seem to her that she was following him because she had no other choice, nor that it was from guilt. She felt in her heart a true devotion to the man; sometimes, distractingly so.

"Is there any way I can help you? Do you have questions?" Aya's voice prodded Rin from her wandering reflections.

"No," Rin answered, her voice distant, "Just gathering my thoughts."

"Learning how to write your own thoughts, and quickly, will be important for doing college-level work," Aya encouraged.

"So? I haven't even entered high school yet." Rin mentally berated herself for speaking without thinking.

"High school is pointless. All you do there is memorize facts for your college entrance examinations, and sleep during class hours," said Aya flatly. "Besides, you shouldn't be afraid of skipping ahead a bit. You've been doing high school level work with me for the past few months."

"I have?" Rin blinked.

"Yes. Keep writing, you only have a few minutes left."

Rin stared at her paper. It seemed like there were a few good ideas holding it together; she certainly had made lists to prove her points, as Aya had suggested. But she had no idea how to close it except to restate her opinion in exactly the same words as she had written them into her introduction.

Rin finally gave up. "This is about all I can do," she said, sliding the paper across the desk. It crinkled a little, as if protesting the slothfulness of the movement, but still reached Aya's glistening fingertips.

Not wasting a moment, she picked it up and scanned the lines. She let out a couple of 'hmms' but refrained commenting until she was finished. She pressed the paper flat against the table-top.

"Yes?" asked Rin, setting her shoulders in preparation for a stark critique.

"What have you been reading lately?"

"I'm sorry?" She was thrown by the question, and it took her a moment to give an answer. "Besides the books you assigned me? Umm, _Sunadokei_…_Nodome Cantabile…_ Why? "

"No, it can't be any of your manga." Aya shook her head, clearly at a loss. "I don't know why, but your writing style is completely different today, Rin."

"What?"

"To put it simply, you just don't sound like you usually do. Your writing in this essay is childish. I expect a higher standard from you."

Rin grew embarrassed, and yet couldn't think of a decent reply. She had been criticized harshly and praised within the same sentence, and had no idea where her behavior had differed.

"I don't think I wrote anything outside the usual," she defended herself. "Can you show me what's wrong?"

"Here."

Aya passed the now slightly beaten paper back to Rin without having written a single comment or edit between the lines of descending squares.(2) At first glance, the kanji swum before her eyes as if they held no meaning, but a moment's focus returned them to their proper place and she began to read her essay with a faint stirring of foreboding. Unfortunately, she hadn't continued for more than half a minute before her foreboding was realized. She saw clearly what Aya had meant, and felt foolish.

Every sentence where she spoke of herself, she began the sentence with "_Rin is_"(3) or "_To Rin,…_" rather than something clever or even normal, such as "I think…" or "I am." It was hard to read her own essay without wincing. It sounded like it had been written by a little girl who didn't know anything at all.

When she finished, she put down the paper with a sigh. "It's not good at all," she said.

"You're right about that point." Aya leaned her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in her hand. She seemed to have crossed half the distance toward Rin with that single movement, and it made her friendly appraisal all the more effective. Rin felt pinpointed by Aya's observation. "I'm not a psychiatrist, Rin, but I've got to ask. Has something happened to upset you recently? Maybe something to do with your project…?"

"No. No, nothing's happened," Rin defended, "I just didn't realize I was writing anything strange at the time. I must be really tired or something..."

Aya withdrew, nodding. "I believe you. It's very unlike you, though, isn't it? So, I think… that today, I'm going to propose a change in our lesson plan. I want you to practice writing lines with proper grammar for the next hour and a half. Let's beat out this mysterious habit of yours, and make sure it doesn't happen again."

Rin meekly bowed her head, eyes avoiding the paper Aya had returned to her.

"Yes, sensei."

.

_Mid-day_

When they came out from the underground mall extension, the first thing that Rin noticed was the hue of the cloudless sky and the vibrancy of the sunlight, both so intense that they appeared to be fiercely sparring in a quest for dominance.

The second thing she noticed was that Sesshoumaru didn't have to squint his eyes when they walked off of the escalator into the bright light like everyone else. He didn't seem to notice the sky at all. Which was a shame, because the sun felt so good on her shoulders and the back of her neck. It had been too long since she'd gotten to feel it. Spring was starting to come upon the city at last.

Sesshoumaru, it seemed, was only noticing smells, judging from the twitching of his nose.

As they walked past a few stores, many of which Rin had seen and heard of (and others that she never hoped to hear about), her eyes caught on a distant white awning, where a few men had ladders set up against the storefront's facade. They appeared to be putting up a large banner. She craned her neck as they approached, but the street was busy, and the sign was too bunched up for her to pick up any characters. She did see, however, a few pictures of pink flowers, and was able to make a fair guess about the rest of the banner's message.

"Sesshoumaru-sama, can you see what that sign says?" she asked.

He didn't even look at it before he answered. "It's for the cherry blossom festival in two weeks."

"Oh! I thought so. But why are they holding it so late? It will already be mid-April by the time the festival starts."

"The blossoms open when they're ready, and no sooner," Sesshoumaru replied. "It is their way."

"Do you like cherry blossoms, Sesshoumaru-sama?"

"Yes." The set of his eyebrows made it very clear that he brooked no argument about it. Rin laughed.

"I do, too," she said. "I like how everyone can enjoy them, all together, all at once and they don't even have to pay for it. It's pretty wherever you go, too, wherever you look, when there's a cherry blossom tree there. I can't wait until they're in full bloom everywhere. And I want to go to the festival with you here. Can I do that?"

"I don't see why not."

"Good. You'll have to promise to take a lunch break off. The light-up only goes on so late…" Rin came to a halt, surprised to find that her feet had taken her further than she'd been aware. They had arrived at the flower shop. The smell of irises once again permeated her senses, lifting her mood even further.

Sesshoumaru, apparently, saw something of this.

"Do you enjoy learning ikebana here?" he asked.

"Oh, yes," Rin averred. "It's more exciting than when you brought in that lady to give me lessons. The people here are younger. No one's my age, though. But I like all of the people I've met here so far. They seem to be having a lot of fun, and that's the whole point of flowers, isn't it? To spread happiness?"

"Your arrangements are always very engaging."

Rin beamed, feeling as if she had been bestowed a second sun to shine upon her. "I'm glad you think so. I'm going to try and make them actually more _pretty_, though. I think that's the other point."

"If that is what you want to think, then it is."

"Anyway, I like ikebana a lot in general, now. And I'm really glad I get to leave the apartment and come here a _lot_."

"Why?" Sesshoumaru's voice held just enough inflection that Rin caught a trace of his discomfort, but she wasn't sure why that would be. "Do you like to travel, Rin?"

"Oh, I've never really thought about it." Rin cocked her head as she considered the idea. "Maybe I would, but I don't know. The furthest I've ever been out of Tokyo was to Yokohama, one time, when Rika was six. It was fun, but I don't think that it counts as travel. But I think I've always liked to talk to all sorts of different people. It's interesting, isn't it?"

Sesshoumaru's expression was placid as he answered. "Interesting."

From his words, Rin couldn't guess whether he was agreeing with her, or making a comment about her, but something told her it was the latter, and she felt a blush seep into her cheeks before she could help it.

"Well, I'm going to go in now so I'm not late for the lesson. Thank you for dropping me off."

Rin moved toward the door, and reached for the handle, only to find that Sesshoumaru had done so as well. She had been closer to it, so she reached it first. The touch of metal on her fingers was cool. It only served to contrast the sudden heat she felt from the hand that was a few inches short of having gripped the door and made a gentlemanly gesture.

His hand hovered over hers for a moment, then pulled away.

"Sesshoumaru-sama…" Rin said, inexorably confused. But he had already turned, with a single hand held up in farewell.

.

_Japanese notes_

(1) harufu - slang word for a person with mixed Japanese ethnicity, usually implying one 'foreign' parent

(1) Japanese hand-written compositions in schools are done on not lined paper, but in lines of boxes so each kanji/character can be placed in each square. This system has the advantage of keeping formatting and length consistent from page to page, and sentence to sentence, in essays and the like.

(2) In the Japanese language, most references to the self are done indirectly, allowing for the speaker to drop the subject of the sentence. Rin's repeated self-reference would seem unnecessarily clear, if not repetitive. Further, it is correct to write a form of the word "I," not to name oneself in the third person, which is a prominent feature of childish language.


	11. Chapter 11

Sorry, this is a draft version of the final chapter. My beta will come in and fix up a few bits soon enough! Sorry, readers! I know you've been waiting for a bit!

.

bird on a wire

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chapter 11

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The white-painted walls of the work shop behind the florists's shop reflected intangible bouquets of sunlight reaching in through the gabled front windows. A long, but slightly frosted mirror above the cabinetry on the back wall picked up the image of a row of flowers, repeating it like a scene from a vividly recounted dream. A handful of stalks lay strewn across the white linoleum table in front of Rin, where the flower stems had been cut at precise angles, and beads of water pooled around their severed ends like untainted blood. Rin's fingers moved busily through a thick knot of tangled baby's breath, separating each plant from the other.

Her friends' voices were as light and conspiratorial as her bunches of the tiny flowers, filling the air around their shared table with a poignant whimsy that hinted at something more substantial than any words they spoke.

Rin didn't understand what it all meant, but thought it incredibly elegant all the same.

"…I just smiled at him, of course, and agreed," Kaho was saying. "But he doesn't know Right Bank from Left Bank. What good is it to buy a bottle of vintage Château Haut-Brion if he's just going to throw it back after the champagne?"

"I only drink champagne, myself," said Miori, touching the diamond-studded Chanelclip that held back her glossy maple-red hair.

"Sparkling, dear. Champagne is what you call sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France," Kaho corrected portentously.

"Don't think you can impress me. You can't even speak French."

"Neither can you," Kaho cut in with a placid, albeit knowing smile. "Though I'm sure that language hardly comes into play with pillow talk, though, does it?"

Miori colored. "That's none of your business. Find your own boy-toy, if you really want to know."

"I've got my hands full enough with my children. Don't need another, but thanks all the same," Kaho answered easily. Miori gave a dreamy sigh and pulled on th pea-green chiffon scarf gathered around her neck. Rin did the same thing, only with the ferns and foliage on the outside of her arrangement.

"I can't wait to have children with Grégoire," Miori breathed, "They're going to be so beautiful… You know, the french people have such tall noses…"

"You'll be sacrificing a few centimeters of your waist for each one of your babies' noses," Kaho warned.

"Miori's pregnant? Congratulations! Now you'll stop spending so much time staring at your waistline in the mirror!" Yukino had returned to the table with several pairs of scissors and a glass of murky white water. She blew a puff of air at her dark brown bangs as she took her seat, apparently enjoying the way they fluttered on her forehead. Rin liked the new haircut, and started to say something to that effect but was drowned out by Miori's outburst.

"I'm not pregnant! There's nothing wrong with having pride in my appearance, and at least I'm not married to a man too old to even give me babies!" she snapped. Yukino abruptly stopped laughing. Miori, however, appeared to take no pride in her accomplishment, instead shifting the source of her desperation from the conversation to the clashing arrangement in front of her. Her flowers stuck out in utter discord. She gave a sidelong glance to Rin, who had been quietly mixing in a few pieces of baby's breath to an assortment of pink carnations and white lilies."Oh, Rin," she cried out, "What am I doing wrong?"

Rin considered the pile of flowers in front of Miori and tried to visualize them as something other than a haphazard lump of pretty things, like a crow's nest composed of shiny objects without any purpose or design.

"I don't think the red anthurium goes well with pink baby's breath," she said after consideration. "Maybe try the white anthurium instead?"

"I don't want it to look plain…"

"Then you can tie it with a nice ribbon at the bottom."

"Or you could try some greenery, like ferns?" Kaho suggested. "See how nicely Rin put hers together?"

"I've already got ferns in mine, too," Miori complained, and bit her lip as she tried to imitate the cradle of branches. "They really just won't flow as nicely as Rin's."

"Well," Rin thought for a moment. "Maybe you could try thinking about how you put the flowers in? Try doing it a different way. Didn't sensei say that it's more about trying to make flowers look 'more natural,' as if you could just find them that way perfectly in the wild somewhere? That we should focus on the shapes and feelings of flowers instead of just their colors? I've always imagined that wildflowers grow something like sensei's bouquet did, except springing out of the ground instead of from a vase. I've never seen wildflowers before, but I've always wanted to- Always wondered what a field of sunflowers would look like, standing in the summer sun-"

Rin looked up to see the two younger women huddling at the edge of their chairs, closing in on her with wondrous expressions.

"What?" she asked, defensive.

"It's just that you're so precious, such a pure thing," said Yukino in amazement, touching the end of her hair like it were a doll's. Miori nodded in agreement, looking slightly jealous.

"It is such a shame you've never seen wildflowers." Kaho's eyes did not lift from her arrangement, even as she apparently broke her concentration to converse. "You should ask your man to take you to the country sometime."

"A man?" exclaimed Miori. She sat back in her chair. "She has a man?"

"Oh, _him, _was he your man?" Yukino added in the same beat.

"What are you talking about? I mean, who-"

"The man who brought you to the door today. He looked extremely pretty," Yukino produced a smile, and Rin realized that Yukino had it all wrong. Maybe she had misunderstood. Surely they weren't talking about Sesshoumaru-san?

Kaho rifled her hand through her widow's peak as she thought, and her wedding ring glinted in the light. "You mentioned his name before, didn't you? Sesshoumaru, was it?"

Rin nodded, only half aware of her body's movement. She felt her heart rate speeding up. "No, no. That's his name, but I think you misunderstood. Sesshoumaru-san, you see, he's-"

"You should've seen how he was looking at Rin when she came in," Yukino added, her voice flat but her eyes keen as a pair of red blades, ready to slice. "He looked extremely _protective_."

"Of course he does; he takes care of me. That's what I'm trying to say. He's not my… my anything… just my guardian," Rin explained, hoping that her words would be sufficient in the midst of the flirtatious banter, though she felt somehow like she was standing unarmed in the midst of a sword fight. It was as if her friends weren't interested in listening to her, they just wanted to sink in their teeth.

"So you're not related by blood?" Yukino pried.

"No. Not by blood."

Yukino's grin was feral. "There you have it," she said, making eye contact with Miori across the table. "Mmm-hmm."

Rin had, of course, looked at Sesshoumaru during their walk together over the past few days. But she hadn't been _watching _him. As far as she could remember, nothing in his disguise had been out of place. He'd looked perfectly human. The light crow's feet had returned to the corners of his eyes, as had a couple of light sun spots at the place where his chin met his ear. His cheeks had hollowed out somewhat. His eyes looked less dynamic, less alive. His ears had been round, almost to the point of being peculiar. But if Yukino and Miori were acting like this, maybe they had picked up on something else that Rin hadn't. Something more peculiar, pointing to his true identity. She had to get them off-track…

She looked down at her bouquet uncomfortably. It was almost finished. Perhaps if she twined in two more bunches of baby's breath, then went to the bathroom for a few minutes, they would move on to another conversation in her absence. She reached for the flowers.

"So this Sesshoumaru of yours," asked Miori. "All this time, and not a single word from you! Tell me, what's he like? Is he foreign?"

"No, but he lived abroad for a number of years," said Rin. She recounted her conversation with Jaken and added, hoping to get them off track, "He's a lot older than I am."

"Compared to you, we're all just shriveling under the sun," said Yukino. Rin remembered belatedly that Yukino had married a much, much older man.

"Does he have a good personality?" Miori pushed.

"Oh, he does. He's really… loyal, but maybe not very nice. Well, he's nice to me, but not to one of his servants. And he can be a bit aloof."

"Typical rich man. But at least he's good looking," said Yukino. "Tell me, does he have some sort of raw, magnetic animalism? He seems like the type that would be really wild. No talk, but all action. A man defined by what he does rather than what he says he is, you know?"

"I don't really know," said Rin, genuinely confused. Yukino had used words that might've described a youkai, but if she guessed that Sesshoumaru was a youkai, than what had that last part meant? "What do you mean by 'what he does?'"

"His actions, of course. A person can say one thing, and usually give the impression that they're a certain type of person, but their actions might give away the fact that they're really different. That's what I mean by 'what he does.' For example, a girl might say she likes sports, and even own a couple of jerseys for her favorite player or whatever, but then you put her in front of a television screen and she doesn't know the captain of the football team from the goalkeeper. So, as for your Sesshoumaru-san, he may look silent and aloof, but does he act that way? I bet he doesn't. I bet he does anything you ever ask."

"I don't know about that," said Rin. "I don't ask for a lot of things."

"But has he refused you of anything? Ever?"

"Besides telling me stuff, you mean?" Rin shook her head. "No… Not really."

"Yeah. See, I told you," Yukino crowed to Miori.

"Told her what?" Rin nonchalantly picked up her baby's breath and tried to wedge it in past the other stems in her vase.

"That he's seducing you."

"What?" Rin accidentally crushed the stalk of her flower between her fingers, and the blush of blossoms bent their heads down. "He's what?"

Miori laughed, pitchy like the a cacophony of tiny bells. "What did you think I was getting at? Do you agree with me, Kaho-san?"

Kaho-san's elegant fingers rifled through a few flowers laying on the table. "I think that Sesshoumaru and Rin are both already very important to each other," she demurred.

"So he's infatuated with you already, and rich to boot," Yukino concluded. "You're probably the best kept 14-year old in Japan. The princess of Japan doesn't look half as well-dressed as you. And I know that bracelet on your wrist costs at least ten thousand yen."

Rin ducked her hand under the table.

"Look, this kind of conversation… It's not …" Appropriate, she wanted to say, or sophisticated. And it should have been. The girls Rika had known in high school used to talk like this. Girls who had been hungry and poor like her, not adult women with more money than either friends or happiness.

And besides, those girls had been talking about actual prospects and marriages arranged for need, not for love. Rin wasn't thinking about either of those things, and neither Sesshoumaru nor Jaken had given her reason to think otherwise. Yukino, Miori, even Kaho just didn't know the whole story. "You really have the wrong idea…" she tried.

Yukino simply tsk'ed at her. "You're among women here, and you need to know what men are like. _We_ certainly do. How do you think we got here? With the exception of Kaho, we all married into it. I bet at least half of the women in this room did."

"But I'm not marrying into anything," said Rin. "I'm only fourteen."

"And I was only a couple years older than you when Edgar first took me on a date. Being young gives you a head start, if anything," said Miori. Her bouquet had improved marginally. The colors now blended better than before, no longer looking at first glance like randomly spilled buckets of paint, but the flowers were clearly overworked and becoming limpid.

"Lay off of little Rin," Kaho warned half-heartedly. "I know this is fun for you two, but she's an innocent. If I found out you were talking to my girls like this, I'd call the police."

"Lighten up. We wouldn't talk to them for another ten years, anyway," Yukino replied frostily. "And it's a shame, that's all I'm saying. I like Rin- I like you, Rin - so I want to see good things happen to you. You could have the world if you wanted it."

Rin's eyes widened. "What do you mean, 'the world'?"

"I'm saying that if you made a move, I bet your man would have you. And then he'd give you whatever you wanted. 'The world.'"

Rin fiddled feebly with her bouquet, but couldn't distract herself from the shocking words around her. Was she talking about prostitution? Only to one man, but still, that's what it was, wasn't it?

When Miori offered an opinion on Yukino's side of the argument, it shocked her more than anything. "Think about what you can offer a man. A girl who is still young and pliable and pure is more rare than anything." Miori demonstrated with one of her flowers, craning its' neck until it emerged from a bundle of magnolia leaves. "He can bend her into whatever shape he wants her to be. He can build her into his perfect woman."

"That's terrible," said Rin, and she believed it. The idea of that kind of pressure, that claustrophobic sort of molding of the human spirit, wasn't the kind of thing that built a person but destroyed them. Just like walls closing in until there was no space left to breathe, it left a person with nowhere to escape to. No freedom anymore. No future.

Kaho inserted her own mild dissent. "Ah, but that's too shallow, Miori. Just because he can have you doesn't mean he holds all the power in the relationship at all. Quite the opposite. A man can never say no to a woman, and the more rare she is, the more that it's true," she said, sliding her fingers down the stalk of an iris and pressing it deeply into the mold. "They say that men want power more than anything. And that, ultimately, they just want it to get a woman and to keep her. So what if a man has the power to get the woman? Here's the secret: all that power is a woman's as soon as _she_ has the _man_. He'll do whatever she asks. A dog may wag its' tail, but if you grab the tail you can wag the dog, as they say."

"And by tail, they mean penis!" said Yukino, making an obscene gesture with her vase and her flower.

"Stop it!" Kaho exclaimed, though her head was thrown back as she laughed. Miori laughed so hard that she got some pollen into her nose and began to sneeze.

Rin stared in mortification. Her eyes were trained on the motion of the flower and the vase, the stalk that was being plunged in and out of the crystal hole. She understood the metaphor well enough, and couldn't keep an image from forming in her head for just a moment, just long enough to grasp the word Sesshoumaru, and for heat to pool at the bottom of her belly, and then she banished the thought and shook her head fiercely. It wasn't sane to listen to this talk. Her friends just didn't get it. Her lord wasn't using her, not like that. And she wasn't using him, either. Why did power have to come into talks about love or affection? And why was she spending any time thinking about this at all? There wasn't anything going on between her and her guardian anyway. This didn't matter to her at all.

"Sesshoumaru-san and I don't have that type of relationship," she told the women firmly.

Yukino looked her in the eye, and Rin bravely stared back, conviction building with every inhaled breath.

"Fine," Yukino conceded at last, still breathless from her laughter. "You don't have that kind of a relationship now, but I saw how he was looking at you in the window. You will, mark my words. All men are the same, Rin. They may look tough and think they are something special, but all it takes is a woman and they are powerless. They'll give up everything for her."

"Sesshoumaru-sama would do that for Rin anyway," she asserted.

Yukino sat back in her chair, her back held tall. "Just don't make me say 'I told you so.' I hate that."

.

_**March 30, 2006**__Late evening_

_Rin_

After the conversation at the flower shop, Rin had spent the afternoon feeling uncomfortable and off-balance. She'd managed to chase away the older women's words for the most part, discounting them and focusing her attention away to other things, like a squabble with Jaken over the television remote. But now it was late at night - past the point when she usually would be sleeping, and all she could do was toss, turn, toss and repeat as minute bled into minute, as minute bled into quarter-hour.

When she saw the green light from her alarm clock blink past midnight, she decided that enough was enough, pulled back her covers and walked into her attached bathroom. She bent over her sink, and splashed lukewarm water on her face. The water felt peculiar against her skin, somehow; it seemed to bring each of her pores into awareness, made the texture of her skin gritty even though she knew it was smooth. She turned off the faucet, watched the last of the water slide down into the hole in the sink, and made her way back to her room. She ran her fingers over her unmade bedspread and the soft under sheet - she had never known that some people slept with an extra sheet between themselves and the blanket - and drew back her hand. She found a book on her bedside table instead. She took it and left the room.

She forewent the outdoors slippers to feel the cool tile of the terrace against her toes. It wasn't as cold as it had been a few weeks ago, even a few days ago. It almost felt nice outside, wearing just a long-sleeved night shirt and a coat, the cold nipping at the water droplets that still clung to the edges of her face. And there weren't walls around her, or blankets ensconcing her, holding her in a mold.

"Rin. Are you well?"

"Sesshoumaru-sama." Rin turned around, startled to see the white haired, yukata-clad figure at the edge of her door. In the dim lighting that came off more from the city below than the cloud sky above, she could just make out the color of the cloth. It matched the moon above his eyes. Her heart pounded in her chest, but she dismissed it. She was surprised to see him.

"Are you well?" Sesshoumaru repeated.

"I couldn't sleep."

"I see."

"I thought coming out here would calm me down, but it's not really working. I'm just feeling confused," She explained further, and sighed. She let her arms drop over the edge of the guardrail, and rested her chin on the top of the cool upper bar, which she sighed against for a second time, feeling excessively melancholy.

Her guardian joined her at the edge, as she knew he would. Fine strands of his hair lifted up and shimmered around his face even after he had stilled.

"Why are you upset?"

Rin wasn't sure how to respond. After all, she could hardly tell him everything. He'd probably be embarrassed to hear it, she reasoned. She was better off just keeping it to herself.

Settling on an air of enigma, she answered, "It's just girl stuff."

"Ah. Yet you are not…" Sesshoumaru's voice trailed off. "That is, to say, your menses…"

Rin shot up, flushing. "No! It's not that, but how could you tell, even if I was?!"

He pointed to his nose as if it were very obvious.

Rin grimaced. She'd had no idea that his nose was that sensitive. "That's horrible. That's horrible. Oh, that's horrible." Rin decided that she was going to start using tampons, no matter how awkward they were. It couldn't be worse than knowing that Sesshoumaru could smell the old and musty blood that leaked between her legs.

Eager to change the conversation, away from both her period and her friends' conversation in the flower shop, Rin flipped the corner pages of her book idly with her thumb and tried to turn the conversation away from herself. "What do you do when you can't sleep, Sesshoumaru-sama?" she asked. "I bet you meditate. I feel too tired to meditate, though. Does that make sense?"

"It does. I meditate, sometimes. Other times, I come out here."

"Is that what happened tonight?" Rin asked. She sought the answer in his face. She was only mildly surprised with how easily she found it before he had opened his mouth; before he had even changed his expression. She had learned how to read him on the night he'd revealed himself in the park. And the answer to her question had been there since before he'd greeted her from the terrace door. Tonight, he had come outside for her.

"I was concerned," he acknowledged.

She smiled up at him, grateful for the tender admission. And she ignored just how _good_ it felt when the corners of his mouth turned up at hers in answer.

.

_'I saw how he was looking at you. He gives you everything you want.'_

.

_**April 2, 2006**_

_Morning_

Jaken

Jaken woke up with a crick in his neck from sleeping against the wheel. The indentions in the calf-leather grip were plastered, for the moment, on his face and his wrist as well. His skin was stinging where the buttons of his Rolex had dug in. The repercussions of sleeping in the driver's seat was never pleasant, even as luxurious as his master's car was. Jaken gave his old body a cursory check: his head was light, his bottom sore, his right foot felt heavy and distant. It seemed as if, were he to try to move it, the appendage would seize up in its sleep. He settled, for the moment, on recollecting his breath and awaiting his blood to flow at a normal rate; for his mind to even out and balance all the sensations around him. He blinked water into his eyes and stared out through the windshield. There, in apparent silence, the familiar tread of worn images passed in and out of life, like water lapping at the edge of a bank. In. Out. In.

In front of him there hung a traffic light, half-obscured by telephone and cable wires. The lines hissed like snakes coiled in a nest, wanting to writhe but kept down by a strange force against their will. Low and heavy concrete walls stretched around homes around his car around him. There were a few bushes, tall and trim, and poles that reached tall and proud, but no trees. No place for trees.

It was familiar. Or perhaps it was just deja vu. He couldn't say if he had been here in another life, in another time, before the sweet scent of ethanol featured in the notes of his sweat, before the city was trapped in a constant haze, before the city.

Humans slagged onward outside the window, too. There bodies were as light as bubbles in a spray of foam, their feet not even strong enough to leave prints on the ground where they walked. And it wasn't ground. It wasn't even their feet. Shoes and pavement got in the way. The real world still waited beneath the asphalt, beneath the pipes that were filled with waste, beneath the new rivers made in metal casings. Too many layers, too many layers… nothing left of the world…

"Why am I here?"

Jaken moved. He felt so languid that it ached. He ran his hands over his face, finding out that it was his human face. A face that used to be so pure.

A couple of girls narrowly walked around the hood of the car, preoccupied with their conversation. In one of the girl's hands, she held a metallic pink cellular phone with a small herd of keychains dangling from its head: a plastic banana, an anime character's figurine, a souvenir of Hello Kitty from Hokkaido, a beaten-up plush teddy-bear that overshadowed the size of the phone itself. They swung around as she walked, hitting the back of her hand as she laughed.

As if in accord with nothing, his hand reached into his pocket and grasped his phone. The device felt warm around the battery pack, so very warm against his hands; warm like winter. He dialed quickly, his fingers jamming the keys. And he waited. No sooner did the line pick up, and he cried, "Where are you, Rin?" with anxious abandon, remembering just in that moment that she was missing.

The reply was not immediate, but it jarred him when it came.

"Stay where you are," said Sesshoumaru's voice. "I'm on my way."

.


End file.
